In earlier posts on ataxingmatter (here and here), I reviewed Robert Reich's 2010 book, After Shock, and wrote about his suggested cures for the problems made most visible in the 2007 crash and the Great Depression that followed.

The gist of the book is summed up in the following quote:

"[L]eft to its own devices, the market concentrates wealth and income--which is
disastrous to an economy as well as to a society." at 59

Corey Robin writes in the Nation about the same problem, Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom, The Nation, Apr. 26, 2011. But he notes that harping on the distributional inequality doesn't resonate with voters. If the left wants to influence policies and capture the hearts of voters, he suggests, it needs to demonstrate that this distributional mayhem, which leaves everybody but the rich vulnerable, has even broader consequences that reach to the very fundamental creation myths of our society--the desire to be our own masters, to free ourselves from a tyrannical monarchy and colonial overlords who seemed to want to dictate how we could work, what we could drink, and where we could live. That is, to make what we are saying comprehensible at the "yeah, that's what counts for me" level, we need to connect to America's own Founding Moment. We need to "reclaim[] the politics of freedom."

And I think he is correct. Because the problem we are facing today, with corporate lobbying and campaign contributions reinforcing the elite class's wining and dining of politicians, is more than the dysfunction of the economy. Yes, there is too much money at the top where there is not enough ability to spend it. Yes, there is too little money at the bottom where there is no way to provide for basic needs. Yes, there is barely enough in the middle, resulting in stagnation in local businesses who don't have enough customers to sell to and can't afford to give credit to those who want to buy.

It is not just that banks, connected to power through their managers and shareholders, are able to speculate with other people's money (our money!) in the international derivatives casino and then push their losses off on us. It is not just that corporate bosses rake in as much in a day as many of their workers make in an entire year of hard labor. It is not just that we can no longer talk to anybody local when there is a problem with our phone or our order from a company. It is not just that ordinary people are ignored, disregarded, almost shunned, because the elite really are only comfortable in the company of other elites. It is not just that we can't get an appointment with a doctor unless we have (expensive) health insurance, or can't get that crown we need on the broken tooth because it costs as much as some of us make in half a year.

No. These things are real, they affect us every day, they make us angry every day because we recognize our powerlessness to deal with the highly impersonal Big Business world that has been fostered by the four decades of reaganomics' deregulation, privatization, tax cuts and militarization. But still, the problem goes much deeper than these things.

Our very freedom is threatened. When we are economically powerless, we are also powerless in our lives because we lose our freedom to make choices that are right for us.

• we lose our rights to bargain with our employers (look at how Wisconsin and Ohio have treated their public employees or how WalMart treats its workers and anyone who talks unions),




• we lose the power to improve ourselves by pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps through publicly funded education from grade school through university,




• we are dominated in the marketplace by powerful businesses that use automated systems to turn us off, ignore our calls and letters seeking redress for a mischarge or a poorly done job,




• we lose our jobs, are forced to accept paycuts or furloughs, when the company claims times are tought, yet we watch the same public companies to pay their CEOs millions more

Our freedom to improve ourselves, freedom to choose the kind of work we want to do, freedom to prepare for our retirement and then retire with some security about our future, freedom from worry about whether or not a catastrophic medical emergency will eat up all our savings and leave family without an adequate living--all these freedoms are being threatened today by the concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite few who thereby become emplowered to set the market terms as they choose.

The idea of the "free market" is a bill of goods sold to replace the real concepts of freedom we should be considering. Markets, of course, can only function well for the people where government constraints prevent the owners and managers from setting all the terms to suit themselves, leaving externalities of their profitmaking to be borne by the people. literally ripping them off. The sloganeers have persuaded ordinary Americans to think that the American Dream of freedom is encapsulated in that little bitty notion of a "free market" so that they will unknowingly throw away the big idea of freedom--the freedom to set one's own course in life, in a cooperative society that works to provide those tools.

The reason we need a progressive tax policy--including at the least progressive tax rates with brackets that reach much higher into the stratosphers of the ultra rich (55% for those making $1 million or more annually) ; elimination of the capital gains preference (so that all income is taxed under the same rate structure); and an estate tax with bite (meaning a graduated rate that protects a reasonable nest egg for the next generation while serving as one method of limiting the concentration of wealth)-- is to ensure the freedom of each and every one of us, from rich to poor, from newly arrived immigrant to elderly Native American.

by divorced one like Bush

As we are talking about taxes and health care this is The Real News Network article regarding raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for health care. (The Real News Network is a global online video news network that listens to and is dependent on its audience. No ads. No government subsidies, no corporate sponsorship. Check out our site.)

Make sure you catch Presidents Obama's response to the obligatory question framed as "punishing the rich". The article interviews Professor Richard Wolff, economist, U of Massachusetts.


If President Obama and Professor Wolff have piked your interest, or you would like to understand why they talked about taxing the rich as they did, you can read my series on taxation starting here, moving to the second one, moving to the final post.
Then you can go here and read Linda Beale's appeal for support of eduction regarding tax literacy.

by Linda Beale

There is an interesting book that I am just beginning, by George A. Akerlof & Robert J. Shiller. It's called "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism". The jacket says that the authors "challenge the economic wisdom that got us into this mess, and put forward a bold new vision that will transform economics and restore prosperity." It is clearly a Keynesian approach--the jacket, again, says they make the case for "a more robust, behaviorally informed Kenyesianism".

Sounds like a tall order, and I have not yet read or thought about enough of the book to know whether it is satisfied or not. But I do find the emphasis on fairness of considerable interest.

Fairness has long been a keystone of tax policy, and yet there are a number of tax scholars who consider efficiency the quintessential policy consideration and sometimes appear to relegate fairness to the corner for hobgoblins of small minds. So I wonder if this book, and its recognition of the overriding importance of fairness to economic analysis, is indicative of a fundamental change in the academic approach to economics and related fields that have tended to push fairness aside.

Here's a quote from Albert Rees (Chicago PhD in labor economics) that starts off the second chapter on fairness.

The neoclassical theory of wage determination, which I taught for 30 years and have tried to explain in my textbook...has nothing to say about fairness. ... Beginning in the mid-1970s, I began to find myself in a series of roles in which I have participated in setting or controlling wages or salaries. ... In none of htese roles did I find the theory that I taught so long to be the slightest help. The factors involved in setting wages and salaries in the real world seemed to be very different from those specified in the neoclassical theory. The one factor that seemed to be of overwhelming importance in all these situations was fairness. (Akerlof & Shiller at 20, quoting Rees, The Economics of Trade Unions, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1973).

The authors go on to admit that Rees exaggerates, but then they provide a critical insight.

However many articles there have been on fairness, and however important economists may consider fairness, it has been continually pushed into a back channel in economic thinking. ... But fairness may be just as important as the economic motivations that are given prime time. (Akerlof & Shiller at 20.)

So what economic theories of fairness do the authors suggest merit consideration? They highlight socilogy's equity theory of exchanges, which consider far more than the monetary value of the counterparties' positions, adding subjective evaluations about status, gratitude and similar factors. Another if the theory of social norms, that suggests that people are happiest when they live up to what they think they should be doing, including conducting themselves fairly with others (and being treated fairly by others).

And how should fairness be taken into account? Essentially, Alerkoff and Shiller argue that the old way of treating "real" economics as fundamental and fairness as an afterthought has to go. In stead, if fairness motivations are discounted, justification must be provided for doing so.

This approach, they say, explains much better than traditional economics the reality of unemployment and the fact that most firms pay their workers more than the market would require. It has to do with one's sense of fairness--if workers sense they are being treated more than fairly (and their wage is the ulimate symbol of this treatment), they will fully buy into the goals of their employers." If they are treated unfairly, they will tend to shirk. Id. at 105.

The difficulty of course, is in settling upon a definitive theory of fairness. In tax, we often talk about "ability to pay", in a relative sense, as the critical definition, which is in turn the justification for a progressive rate schedule that taxes wealthy people at a rate considerably (or, after 40 years of rate lowering, somewhat) higher than it taxes middle income people. Libertarians, among others, have pushed back against the ability to pay concept of fairness, arguing for one version or another of a flat tax. It is one of the critical struggles, from my perspective, in the current class warfare whereby some groups are pushing for zero taxation on capital income (through a national sales tax or consumption-base rather than an income-based tax system). In other words, though there is a long-held consensus position about fairness in tax, there is currently considerable foment around the very concept of fairness. I'm glad to see fairness appropriately emphasized, but that is just the first step to developing a fairer tax system or a more complete economic theory.