Civil Nations
I’ve long been fascinated with the angst my peers in the middle to upper middle class exhibit toward preserving tax benefits for the wildly wealthy. Take the inheritance tax as an example. It only effects the fantastically rich–those people that don’t even have to work in order to make millions of dollars per year off capital gains alone. Yet few things get their hearts pumping more than the idea of abolishing the inheritance tax (which only kicks in if your estate is worth approxiately 11 million dollars). No one in the middle class is effected by this–so why the flutter? The top 5% of the wealthiest people in the U.S. are already a breed of American “landed gentry” (hello Jane Austin and Downton Abby). Why pass tax policies that favor this small group of people? Krugman suggests that one reason the Republican elites will not denounce Trump is associated with this and other questions related to holdings of the super rich. And no, taxing the marvelously rich will not collapse the American economy. Quite the opposite.
Enjoy the read.
This is a very interesting opinion piece from Paul Krugman of the New York Times.
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