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Hauser’s Law

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Clarissa

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The top tax rate has hovered from 92% to 28% in the past 80 years. Yet, as a percentage of the GDP, tax revenue remained in the same small range.

You can charge the top earners under 30% in taxes. You can charge them over 90%. The amount of money that the government receives as a result remains identical.

Raising the taxes on the rich to sky-high levels has been done. Here in this country, it’s been done. It changed nothing. This is not how you strengthen the welfare safety net. This is the opposite of how you strengthen it.

What exactly needs to happen for people to learn from the recent past?

5 responses to “Hauser’s Law”

  1. overgrownhobbit Avatar
    overgrownhobbit

    Declare every professional teacher hostis humanis generis, salt the earth at the Education Schools, and rebuild from scratch.

    What, you think we don’t know who taught these kids? And their parents. And grandparents?

    It’s been a century of Fabians and Soviets and useful idiots and immigrant subversives termite-ing away, however, so rhetoric notwithstanding, we need to build up, over, and around, and try to see all but the most malicious actors with eyes of love.

    Repentance and forgiveness is the only way.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Elizabeth Warren was an Economics professor at a fancy university. There’s no chance she doesn’t know this. Yet she screeches incessantly about “making the rich pay their fair share.” She’s simply a dishonest, nasty person.

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    the point is to punish success not raise more money. They know what they are doing

    A

    Liked by 1 person

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yes. Absolutely. But do the facile dupes who vote for them understand this? Or is the envy towards rich people robbing them of their capacity to think? Like in the parable of a man who was told he can ask for anything and get it, but his neighbor would get twice what he gets. The man thought and asked for one of his eyes to be poked out.

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Some of the differences in your chart are huge. From 2000-2010 receipts dropped by more than 25%, measured as a share of GDP. This was a period of massive tax cuts. Over the same period, the federal budget went from a 2.3% surplus to a 9.8% deficit (also measured as a share of GDP).

    Last year the deficit was 5.8%. It would be reasonable to try to close some of the gap with taxes, especially given the massive wealth that has accumulated at the top.

    But it is true that people who want to solve the whole problem by taxation are dreaming. Government waste is massive and massively growing, and cutting this must also be part of any serious approach to deficit reduction.

    The difficulty is that we are in an era of great waste generally. It is no accident that DOGE was a bust. Corporate waste is also massive and massively growing. No one seems to have any idea how to tackle this waste. Republicans used to fight it, but those days are in the rear-view mirror. Now the arguments are just over which pet causes get the money.

    -P

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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