Almost Classical

Though I don't assume Sen. Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic Party nominee for president, I do assume the next president will respond to populist outrage against corporations (especially those in the financial sector). As a result of this populism on the left and right (Tea Party and Occupy having the same vitriol for Crony Capitalism), there is little hope for meaningful corporate tax reform. Ignorance (or feigned ignorance) on issues of economics seems to underpin the campaigns of all four leading candidates as we enter the "home stretch" of primaries. From Donald Trump swearing to raise taxes to 30 percent on companies that leave the United States to Bernie Sanders claiming that we must shift the tax burden (income taxes are already progressive, the "burden" tends to be sales and other local or state taxes that do penalize the poor, not income tax). The United States needs tax reform, of both the personal (household) income tax system and the corpor...

My wife and I have been in the top ten percent off and on for a few years. We've even made it, briefly, into the top five percent. And, like most people in those "upper-class" categories, we quickly fell back out of the top tier of households.  Why is that?  For one thing, high incomes tend to be temporary "blips" related to "good years" for some professions. The highest earners are not salaried workers with steady, predictable incomes. Instead, the highest earners are glorified freelancers: doctors, lawyers, consultants, and other specialists.  Some years are great for professionals. You might have an unusual number of surgeries if you're a doctor. Maybe you win a windfall case if you're a lawyer. A consultant lands one great contract. The money flows in for that year and you stash some away. Because, as the upper-middle knows, that one year is pretty rare.  Eleven percent, slightly more than one out of every ten adults in the...

I'm not a huge fan of the minimum wage, but I also admit it isn't going away. It's a feel-good public policy that some nations embrace with complex brackets (Australia indexes for age of worker) and others simply don't have at all. There's little economic correlation between the minimum wage and job creation, because the wage tends to trail earned wages in skilled trades. Which nations don't have legal minimum wages? How about Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland! Germany has regional minimums, handled by local governments, just as many states in the United States set their own minimums. How can it be that social democracies don't have minimum wages? They have a history of employee ownership, through unions with board seats at companies. The United States lacks a similar history of corporate-union or even government-union cooperation. Our unions are more adversarial. (Maybe they should try another approach; it might increase wages and influ...

The narrative is set, and as a rhetorician, I appreciate the value of a good story in shaping public debate. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and many of the middle class are being pushed down into the lower-class. It's a sad story, a compelling story, and in some important ways it is a fiction. Yes, the middle class is shrinking. That should concern us. But what if the shrinking middle class is as much a result of people moving into the upper class as it is a result of others moving down the social ladder? In fact, some research shows there are more people moving from the middle into the upper income brackets, leaving a smaller middle class — but not for the reasons being promoted by the media and politicians. Exceptions in the media coverage exist, as they do in little tiny dimly lit sections of academia. Readers know I enjoy Robert Samuelson because he digs deeper into statistics than other newspaper columnists. The 'hollowing' of the mi...

This campaign season in the United States is already producing some meme myths on social media. One I keep seeing is the "90% tax rate" myth. Often, the responses prove people don't understand the marginal rate system of the U.S. income tax. Another meme that does reflect marginal rates claims there was a 70 percent effective tax rate. That's not quite reality, either, though. (It is, and it isn't, as I'll try to explain.) The most popular blog posts on Almost Classical remains The 90% Tax Rate Myth , in which I explain effective rates vs. top marginal rates and the relative stability of top rates excluding outliers of less than 10 tax filers. That’s necessary because some of the “top tax rates” would have applied to… ONE PERSON . As I wrote in that old post: As a result of deductions and exclusions, even the theoretical maximum Real Rate of taxation at 60% in 1944 overstates taxation dramatically. The reality? On earned income, the richest U.S. taxpayer...

William Campbell was kind enough to include an interview with me in his podcast series, Challenging Opinions. To learn more about the series, visit: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/challenging-opinions/id1033974650?mt=2

Economics is not a simple discipline to understand. Yet, all around us are people claiming that complex economic matters can be as clear as "Econ 101" when debating public policy. Sorry, but Econ 101 doesn't answer anything and the rhetorical shorthand does the discipline (and policy debates) a disservice. When you take an introductory class in any topic, from physics to programming, the concepts are necessarily simplified. It is like teaching a child to read. You start with phonics in English and tell the child that letters make sounds. Oops. But it isn't really that simple, is it? Phonetic rules change and words in English have complex etymologies. Rules you learn as a new reader quickly vanish or have to be understood as a small part of a complex flowchart. Economic principles like "supply and demand" or "externalities" seem simple enough in the language and models of Econ 101. And then you head into the bushes and discover there are more...