masaccio — Piketty’s Perfectly Plausible Proposal

Piketty documents a vast increase in inequality in income, forecasts an ever worsening increase in wealth inequality, and offers a perfectly plausible proposal to deal with the social consequences of both. He says that we should impose a big increase in the top brackets of the income tax, a big increase in the top brackets of the estate tax, and a direct world-wide tax on capital. 

Pundits of every stripe say the same thing: the proposal is utopian. It can’t happen. It will never happen. And since it can’t happen, it isn’t worth discussing any further, and let’s try my favorite proposal, which I have been pushing for years and is a staple of liberal or conservative politics, strengthening unions, improving education, increasing technology-driven growth, whatever. Their ideas have been around for decades and nothing has happened. Nothing happened for a very good reason: rich people don’t like those ideas any more than they like higher taxes, and Congress does what the rich want them to do. That’s the basis for the pundits’ claim that Piketty’s idea is utopian. Apparently the irony of their criticism is lost on them.

Piketty’s proposal is different: it strikes directly at the problem, the very problem that the pundits refuse to identify. The problem is that the filthy rich control too much money and too many people’s lives, and they are wrecking society with their ever increasing demands for higher returns on their staggering piles of money, and their control over the supposedly democratic societies to enforce their demands. Piketty’s proposal allows people to stack up the money, but then the societies that nurtured them bite into the stacks of money and make it impossible for them to strangle the people who made that accumulation possible.... 

Piketty’s tax proposals cut through the garbage. They directly reduce the power of the filthy rich. They provide governments with the wealth they need to improve the lives of every one of us. They insure that the benefits of capitalism flow to all citizens, not just the members of the lucky sperm and egg club. They make room for new ideas, new forms of living and new and better ways to live with the changes that are coming. That isn’t true of any of the other proposals.

The people who call Piketty’s ideas utopian and impossible are making real change impossible.

The solutions are basically, let them stack up the money and then take it away from them, and don't let them stack up the money in the first place. I favor the second alternative. It's called "socialism," i.e., putting people first, over money and machines.

FDL
Piketty’s Perfectly Plausible Proposal
masaccio