Inflation Is A Tax On The Rich

With the Republican Party utterly opposed to tax increases on the rich but interested in raising taxes on the elderly and poor, opportunities for progressive income redistribution through taxation will be hard to find in coming years. Fortunately, there's another way to redistribute real wealth: inflation!

If people have a bunch of money, inflation reduces the real value of their cash stash. So they end up worse off. So do people to whom debts are owed, since they get paid back in relatively cheaper money. On the other hand, people who don't have a lot of money don't take much of a hit. People who are in debt actually end up better off, since the real value of their debts declines. The more money you have, the more inflation hurts you, and if you have negative money, it helps you.

If you're rich and most of your wealth is in cash or bonds or something like that, your main asset -- money -- becomes less valuable in terms of the amount of poor people's labor it can buy. But if you're poor and your main asset is just your labor, that becomes more valuable in terms of the amount of rich people's money it can command. This is a progressive redistribution of real assets.

That's why I've gotten really into all this platinum coin stuff, and I'm eager to find new ways to make more money come into existence. If you can spend it on something good for poor people, all the better! But just for its own sake, supporting a higher rate of inflation (4% would be good) is something worth doing.

All I Want Is Some Frickin Clouds, and some Frickin' Laser Beams!

Scientists in Switzerland have been testing the ability to affect the weather by firing laser beams into the air, possibly rainfall—they haven't gotten that far yet—but at the very least having some on where rain falls and how heavily.

I have no idea what the practical applications or moral implications of this sort of technology would be. It's a bit too close science fiction for me to process.

Why Have Income Taxes When You Can Have Payroll Taxes?

I like Bernie Sanders' proposal to collect payroll taxes on income over $250K as a way to save Social Security. It's making me wonder whether it might be better to tax earnings entirely on the payroll side rather than the income side. To do this in a progressive way, you'd need a graduated structure for payroll tax rates. But this is the kind of thing that business tax software is set up to handle, so the extra complexity isn't going to cause any trouble.

If you'd like to minimize the impact of bad parts of the income tax code like the home mortgage interest deduction, this would be a way to do it. Just shift the taxation over to a place where the deductions don't exist. There are good deductions, like the charity one, but maybe it's worthwhile overall to just make the deductions irrelevant. At the same time, you'd be making tax preparation more efficient by doing it all in one place where professionals and computers could take care of it, instead of forcing every American to spend hours trying to be an amateur accountant in the first few months of the year.

Cover Vasectomies Too

Pema Levy notes that while contraception is free for women under the Affordable Care Act, this doesn't apply to men. I didn't even think about this before when I was getting all excited about free contraception for women. Simply covering contraception (condoms, vasectomies, etc.) for both sexes seems like the right thing to do here. Especially since "Vasectomies are far cheaper, safer, and have more minor effects than tubal ligation, the female sterilization procedure."

Unwanted pregnancies are highly disruptive events for the people directly involved, and for society in general. We all have an interest in preventing them.

Howard Schultz Is Helpless At Politics

Many successful businesspeople don't understand how you accomplish political goals:

Led by Howard Schultz of Starbucks, more than 100 CEOs have signed a pledge to halt all political campaign contributions until lawmakers, as Schultz puts it, "stop the partisan gridlock in Washington, D.C." ...AOL's Tim Armstrong, Frontier Communications' Maggie Wilderotter, Zipcar's Scott Griffith, Whole Foods' Walter Robb and Intuit's Bill Campbell have all signed up... Schultz has said his breaking point was the contentious debate over raising the debt ceiling -- and the failure to reach a long-term solution to lower deficits.

Maybe they're not telling it straight (hey, the economy is bad, and they have mansion payments to make) and this as a cover story. If so, clever or whatever.

But if they're serious -- the way you actually change the political system is not by leaving. It's by identifying the people who are closer to doing what you want, rewarding them, and punishing the people who are further away from doing what you want. Even if you think every single incumbent in the country is equally bad (which is unlikely, there are 536 of them at the federal level and countless more down further, so you can find a dozen that you really like and fund them) you could at least let their challengers know that pledges to do things the bipartisan way will be rewarded.

I wouldn't be annoyed about this if these were corrupt people who were using their money to corrupt the system. And for all I know, maybe they actually are just corrupt and I shouldn't be annoyed. But for the time being I'm taking their claims of being public-spirited people seriously worried about partisan gridlock at face value. If that's the truth, the path forward is easy. Identify the greatest villains (hint: if someone happily self-describes as a hostage-taker in the debt ceiling fight and says he'll do it again? there's a villain) and commit yourself to their destruction. Call them out as the unreasonable ones, and commit to helping their opponents.

If you take the people who claim to want bipartisanship at face value, they stand out in our politics as a class of especially confused and ineffective people. I guess the people who voted for Christine O'Donnell over Mike Castle in last year's Delaware GOP primary might outrank them on that score, and those who voted Nader in swing states back in 2000. But really, this is a case where it may be charitable to see them as dishonest, because the alternative is to see them as morons, and it just depends on what you think is worse.