Watch the very moment the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics is announced. Presented by Göran K. Hansson, Secretary General of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
TJKCB2019-10-11 12:51:53回複悄悄話
New York Times Opinion??Verified account? @nytopinion · 15m15 minutes ago
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For the first time in the past hundred years, the working class — the 50% of Americans with the lowest incomes — pays higher tax rates than billionaires, write economists Emmanuel Saez and @gabriel_zucman
Almost a decade ago, Warren Buffett made a claim that would become famous. He said that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary, thanks to the many loopholes and deductions that benefit the wealthy.
His claim sparked a debate about the fairness of the tax system. In the end, the expert consensus was that, whatever Buffett’s specific situation, most wealthy Americans did not actually pay a lower tax rate than the middle class. “Is it the norm?” the fact-checking outfit Politifact asked. “No.”
Time for an update: It’s the norm now.
For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data.
That’s a sharp change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the wealthy paid vastly higher tax rates than the middle class or poor.
Since then, taxes that hit the wealthiest the hardest — like the estate tax and corporate tax — have plummeted, while tax avoidance has become more common.
President Trump’s 2017 tax cut, which was largely a handout to the rich, plays a role, too. It helped push the tax rate on the 400 wealthiest households below the rates for almost everyone else.
The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23 percent, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. This overall rate was 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
The combined result is that over the last 75 years the United States tax system has become radically less progressive.
[Sign up for David Leonhardt’s daily newsletter with commentary on the news and reading suggestions from around the web.]
The data here come from the most important book on government policy that I’ve read in a long time — called “The Triumph of Injustice,” to be released next week. The authors are Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who have done pathbreaking work on taxes. Saez has won the award that goes to the top academic economist under age 40, and Zucman was recently profiled on the cover of Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine as “the wealth detective.”
They have constructed a historical database that tracks the tax payments of households at different points along the income spectrum going back to 1913, when the federal income tax began. The story they tell is maddening — and yet ultimately energizing.
“Many people have the view that nothing can be done,” Zucman told me. “Our case is, ‘No, that’s wrong. Look at history.’” As they write in the book: “Societies can choose whatever level of tax progressivity they want.” When the United States has raised tax rates on the wealthy and made rigorous efforts to collect those taxes, it has succeeded in doing so.
And it can succeed again.
Saez and Zucman portray the history of American taxes as a struggle between people who want to tax the rich and those who want to protect the fortunes of the rich. The story starts in the 17th century, when Northern colonies created more progressive tax systems than Europe had. Massachusetts even enacted a wealth tax, which covered financial holdings, land, ships, jewelry, livestock and more.
The Southern colonies, by contrast, were hostile to taxation. Plantation owners worried that taxes could undermine slavery by eroding the wealth of shareholders, as the historian Robin Einhorn has explained, and made sure to keep tax rates low and tax collection ineffective. (The Confederacy’s hostility to taxes ultimately hampered its ability to raise money and fight the Civil War.)
By the middle of the 20th century, the high-tax advocates had prevailed. The United States had arguably the world’s most progressive tax code, with a top income-tax rate of 91 percent and a corporate tax rate above 50 percent.
But the second half of the 20th century was mostly a victory for the low-tax side. Companies found ways to take more deductions and dodge taxes. Politicians cut every tax that fell heavily on the wealthy: high-end income taxes, investment taxes, the estate tax and the corporate tax. The justification for doing so was usually that the economy as a whole would benefit.
The justification turned out to be wrong. The wealthy, and only the wealthy, have done fantastically well over the last several decades. G.D.P. growth has been disappointing, and middle-class income growth even worse.
The American economy just doesn’t function very well when tax rates on the rich are low and inequality is sky high. It was true in the lead-up to the Great Depression, and it’s been true recently. Which means that raising high-end taxes isn’t about punishing the rich (who, by the way, will still be rich). It’s about creating an economy that works better for the vast majority of Americans.
In their book, Saez and Zucman sketch out a modern progressive tax code. The overall tax rate on the richest 1 percent would roughly double, to about 60 percent. The tax increases would bring in about $750 billion a year, or 4 percent of G.D.P., enough to pay for universal pre-K, an infrastructure program, medical research, clean energy and more. Those are the kinds of policies that do lift economic growth.
One crucial part of the agenda is a minimum global corporate tax of at least 25 percent. A company would have to pay the tax on its profits in the United States even if it set up headquarters in Ireland or Bermuda. Saez and Zucman also favor a wealth tax; Elizabeth Warren’s version is based on their work. And they call for the creation of a Public Protection Bureau, to help the I.R.S. crack down on tax dodging.
I already know what some critics will say about these arguments — that the rich will always figure out a way to avoid taxes. That’s simply not the case. True, they will always manage to avoid some taxes. But history shows that serious attempts to collect more taxes usually succeed.
Ask yourself this: If efforts to tax the super-rich were really doomed to fail, why would so many of the super-rich be fighting so hard to defeat those efforts?
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.
David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt ? Facebook
“Historically, Medicare-for-all has meant single-payer health insurance, a national government-run program that covered every American and replaced private coverage entirely, similar to the government-run health care programs in Canada and some European countries.“
“But these days, other plans are falling under the Medicare-for-all umbrella. Some progressives, like Green, are even comfortable with the term being applied to the various proposals to allow all Americans buy into Medicare. Some of those plans used to be branded as a “public option”; they would not end private insurance that more than half of Americans get, usually through work, as a true single-payer would.“
? What about Obama care? “If you like your plan,you can keep it -baiwen- ♂ 給 baiwen 發送悄悄話 baiwen 的博客首頁 baiwen 的個人群組 (124 bytes) (13 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 05:24:23
7.You can find your own net worth number on the chart.
Image credit: Bloomberg. Data sources: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2018 for worth numbers -2 through 8. Bloomberg Billionaires Index for 9-11. Federal Reserve, Financial Samurai, Bloomberg Reporting, Bloomberg Billionaires Index.https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/bloomberg-businessweek-wealth-number-ranking-shows-inequality.html
? More
For the first time in the past hundred years, the working class — the 50% of Americans with the lowest incomes — pays higher tax rates than billionaires, write economists Emmanuel Saez and @gabriel_zucman
Op-Ed Columnist
The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes Than You
By David Leonhardt
Oct. 6, 2019
Almost a decade ago, Warren Buffett made a claim that would become famous. He said that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary, thanks to the many loopholes and deductions that benefit the wealthy.
His claim sparked a debate about the fairness of the tax system. In the end, the expert consensus was that, whatever Buffett’s specific situation, most wealthy Americans did not actually pay a lower tax rate than the middle class. “Is it the norm?” the fact-checking outfit Politifact asked. “No.”
Time for an update: It’s the norm now.
For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data.
That’s a sharp change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the wealthy paid vastly higher tax rates than the middle class or poor.
Since then, taxes that hit the wealthiest the hardest — like the estate tax and corporate tax — have plummeted, while tax avoidance has become more common.
President Trump’s 2017 tax cut, which was largely a handout to the rich, plays a role, too. It helped push the tax rate on the 400 wealthiest households below the rates for almost everyone else.
The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23 percent, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. This overall rate was 70 percent in 1950 and 47 percent in 1980.
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
The combined result is that over the last 75 years the United States tax system has become radically less progressive.
[Sign up for David Leonhardt’s daily newsletter with commentary on the news and reading suggestions from around the web.]
The data here come from the most important book on government policy that I’ve read in a long time — called “The Triumph of Injustice,” to be released next week. The authors are Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who have done pathbreaking work on taxes. Saez has won the award that goes to the top academic economist under age 40, and Zucman was recently profiled on the cover of Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine as “the wealth detective.”
They have constructed a historical database that tracks the tax payments of households at different points along the income spectrum going back to 1913, when the federal income tax began. The story they tell is maddening — and yet ultimately energizing.
“Many people have the view that nothing can be done,” Zucman told me. “Our case is, ‘No, that’s wrong. Look at history.’” As they write in the book: “Societies can choose whatever level of tax progressivity they want.” When the United States has raised tax rates on the wealthy and made rigorous efforts to collect those taxes, it has succeeded in doing so.
And it can succeed again.
Saez and Zucman portray the history of American taxes as a struggle between people who want to tax the rich and those who want to protect the fortunes of the rich. The story starts in the 17th century, when Northern colonies created more progressive tax systems than Europe had. Massachusetts even enacted a wealth tax, which covered financial holdings, land, ships, jewelry, livestock and more.
The Southern colonies, by contrast, were hostile to taxation. Plantation owners worried that taxes could undermine slavery by eroding the wealth of shareholders, as the historian Robin Einhorn has explained, and made sure to keep tax rates low and tax collection ineffective. (The Confederacy’s hostility to taxes ultimately hampered its ability to raise money and fight the Civil War.)
By the middle of the 20th century, the high-tax advocates had prevailed. The United States had arguably the world’s most progressive tax code, with a top income-tax rate of 91 percent and a corporate tax rate above 50 percent.
But the second half of the 20th century was mostly a victory for the low-tax side. Companies found ways to take more deductions and dodge taxes. Politicians cut every tax that fell heavily on the wealthy: high-end income taxes, investment taxes, the estate tax and the corporate tax. The justification for doing so was usually that the economy as a whole would benefit.
The justification turned out to be wrong. The wealthy, and only the wealthy, have done fantastically well over the last several decades. G.D.P. growth has been disappointing, and middle-class income growth even worse.
The American economy just doesn’t function very well when tax rates on the rich are low and inequality is sky high. It was true in the lead-up to the Great Depression, and it’s been true recently. Which means that raising high-end taxes isn’t about punishing the rich (who, by the way, will still be rich). It’s about creating an economy that works better for the vast majority of Americans.
In their book, Saez and Zucman sketch out a modern progressive tax code. The overall tax rate on the richest 1 percent would roughly double, to about 60 percent. The tax increases would bring in about $750 billion a year, or 4 percent of G.D.P., enough to pay for universal pre-K, an infrastructure program, medical research, clean energy and more. Those are the kinds of policies that do lift economic growth.
One crucial part of the agenda is a minimum global corporate tax of at least 25 percent. A company would have to pay the tax on its profits in the United States even if it set up headquarters in Ireland or Bermuda. Saez and Zucman also favor a wealth tax; Elizabeth Warren’s version is based on their work. And they call for the creation of a Public Protection Bureau, to help the I.R.S. crack down on tax dodging.
I already know what some critics will say about these arguments — that the rich will always figure out a way to avoid taxes. That’s simply not the case. True, they will always manage to avoid some taxes. But history shows that serious attempts to collect more taxes usually succeed.
Ask yourself this: If efforts to tax the super-rich were really doomed to fail, why would so many of the super-rich be fighting so hard to defeat those efforts?
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.
David Leonhardt is a former Washington bureau chief for the Times, and was the founding editor of The Upshot and head of The 2020 Project, on the future of the Times newsroom. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for columns on the financial crisis. @DLeonhardt ? Facebook
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Medicare for All到底有幾個意思
來源: 非否 於 2019-09-27 00:16:57 [檔案] [博客] [舊帖] [給我悄悄話] 本文已被閱讀: 1503 次 (1964 bytes)
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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/2/17468448/medicare-for-all-single-payer-health-care-2018-elections
“Historically, Medicare-for-all has meant single-payer health insurance, a national government-run program that covered every American and replaced private coverage entirely, similar to the government-run health care programs in Canada and some European countries.“
意思是,隻有一個政府提供的醫療保險,沒有其它醫療保險公司,即“單一支付者”係統。Sanders的計劃屬於這一種。
“But these days, other plans are falling under the Medicare-for-all umbrella. Some progressives, like Green, are even comfortable with the term being applied to the various proposals to allow all Americans buy into Medicare. Some of those plans used to be branded as a “public option”; they would not end private insurance that more than half of Americans get, usually through work, as a true single-payer would.“
這形容了楊的計劃:一開始是政府提供的醫保每個人都可以加入,但和私營的醫保如Kaiser,Aetna,UHC並存,供民眾選擇。以後逐漸過渡到隻有一個政府提供的醫保,Medicare,和上麵的一樣。
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您的位置: 文學城 ? 論壇 ? 時事述評 ? Medicare for All到底有幾個意思
所有跟帖:
? What about Obama care? “If you like your plan,you can keep it -baiwen- ♂ 給 baiwen 發送悄悄話 baiwen 的博客首頁 baiwen 的個人群組 (124 bytes) (13 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 05:24:23
? Obamacare(Romneycare)是Universal Healthcare,不是Medicare for All.長遠 -非否- ♀ 給 非否 發送悄悄話 非否 的博客首頁 非否 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (1 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 10:16:42
? Obamacare長遠都不取代私營醫保,每個人可以選擇已有的私營保險 -非否- ♀ 給 非否 發送悄悄話 非否 的博客首頁 非否 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (0 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 10:20:08
? 至少楊的Medicare for All既不保所有非移,也不是free -非否- ♀ 給 非否 發送悄悄話 非否 的博客首頁 非否 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (0 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 10:22:37
? 誰會相信民主黨“逐漸過渡”這種鬼話? -mobileuser- ♀ 給 mobileuser 發送悄悄話 mobileuser 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (0 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 07:08:33
? 楊說得明白,他就是Single Payer,這個ID典型的一知半解,被猛打耳光以後還喋喋不休,做夢要找回場子的笑話貼, -tibuko- ♂ 給 tibuko 發送悄悄話 tibuko 的博客首頁 tibuko 的個人群組 (212 bytes) (10 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 13:53:43
? 問:如何過渡到單一支付?多少年?楊答:樂觀地說5-10年 -非否- ♀ 給 非否 發送悄悄話 非否 的博客首頁 非否 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (1 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 15:18:28
? 加拿大是Single Payer沒疑問吧?還有大醫保公司嗎?報個名來聽聽? -非否- ♀ 給 非否 發送悄悄話 非否 的博客首頁 非否 的個人群組 (71 bytes) (2 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 15:22:55
? 自己找來的視頻,聽得懂嗎?一個還是不止一個,會數嗎?看看是誰倒打一耙 -非否- ♀ 給 非否 發送悄悄話 非否 的博客首頁 非否 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (0 reads) 09/27/2019 postreply 15:32:29
7.You can find your own net worth number on the chart.
Image credit: Bloomberg. Data sources: Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2018 for worth numbers -2 through 8. Bloomberg Billionaires Index for 9-11. Federal Reserve, Financial Samurai, Bloomberg Reporting, Bloomberg Billionaires Index.https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/07/bloomberg-businessweek-wealth-number-ranking-shows-inequality.html
8.
?
所有跟帖:
? 但他們還是交多稅錢給政府,美國還有40%幾人不用交稅呢! -piris1987- ♀ 給 piris1987 發送悄悄話 piris1987 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (1 reads) 10/08/2019 postreply 08:44:00
? 不交稅是因為收入少 -五刀口- ♂ 給 五刀口 發送悄悄話 五刀口 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (2 reads) 10/08/2019 postreply 08:45:04
? 明白。美國還是靠富人和中產的稅錢來運作 -piris1987- ♀ 給 piris1987 發送悄悄話 piris1987 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (3 reads) 10/08/2019 postreply 08:49:03
? 幾乎所有國家都一樣, -五刀口- ♂ 給 五刀口 發送悄悄話 五刀口 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (0 reads) 10/08/2019 postreply 08:50:15
? 窮人在購物時也要交稅,不直接交的還有房東轉的地產稅,雇主付的payroll taxes等 -非否- ♀ 給 非否 發送悄悄話 非否 的博客首頁 非否 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (0 reads) 10/08/2019 postreply 09:31:50
? 人家給的理由很高尚:是為了讓資本家再投資提高就業率,和幾十年不漲最低時薪的理由一樣 -寶寶抱抱- ♀ 給 寶寶抱抱 發送悄悄話 寶寶抱抱 的博客首頁 寶寶抱抱 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (1 reads) 10/08/2019 postreply 08:59:57
? 標題就是假新聞 -tibuko- ♂ 給 tibuko 發送悄悄話 tibuko 的博客首頁 tibuko 的個人群組 (0 bytes) (1 reads) 10/08/2019 postreply 09:00:09
? 不會數數的,不懂稅和稅率的區別不奇怪。https://bbs.wenxuecity.com/currentevent/18733 -非否- ♀ 給 非否 發送悄悄話 非否 的博客首頁 非否 的個人群組 (132 bytes) (0 reads) 10/08/2019 postreply 09:37:24