Let us all bow our heads in thanks for bad politics.
Robin Hood Arithmetic
W. C. Fields to his adopted daughter Poppy: “I am like Robin Hood: I take from the rich and give to the poor.”
Poppy: “What poor?”
Fields: “Us poor.”
—Poppy (1936)
The Sherwood Forest ethic has a long-standing appeal. The legend dates back at least to the thirteenth century. Today all politicians promise to be something of a Robin Hood and some politicians promise to be Robin, Little John, Friar Tuck, and Maid Marian rolled into one: free health care, free day care, free college tuition, forgiveness of outstanding student loans, Universal Basic Income (UBI), and throw in the kitchen sink of subsidized housing for the homeless who crowd the sidewalks of San Francisco and Portland where everybody votes for politicians who promise subsidized housing for the homeless.
Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is a not unkindly notion and often a tempting idea. Alas, some Sheriff of Nottingham math is in order.
The 10 percent of Americans who earn the most money make a total of about $4.75 trillion a year. These are the rich. Not that they’re crazy rich. An annual household income of $118,000 puts people in the top 10 percent. But let’s not quibble; $118,000 ain’t hay. They’re the rich. We’ll take from them. And, what the heck, let’s take everything from them. All $4.75 trillion.
Now let’s give to the poor. Or try to. The federal budget for 2020—without any new programs for dispensing costly goods and services at no cost to the recipients—is . . . you guessed it . . . $4.75 trillion.
A 100 percent tax on the income of the rich would last the federal government one year.
Then, the next year, when the IRS comes to take 100 percent of rich people’s incomes . . . My guess is they’ve moved to the Cayman Islands.
Even if the rich stick around, they haven’t been getting any money all year so now they’re the poor, and they qualify for getting all the free stuff too.
How are we going to pay for it? I suppose we could ask the 10 percent to keep working while continuing to not get paid. They might be crabby about that.
So let’s not tax income. Let’s tax wealth. Being bloated plutocrats isn’t about what the rich earn, it’s about what they own. The filthy rich still have a fortune socked away in physical assets, stocks, bonds, real estate, and the secret Cayman Islands bank accounts they all use. (Slip a little Medicare for All and UBI to Cayman Islands bank tellers and we’ll have rich people’s PIN numbers in no time.)
America has tremendous wealth disparity. This is obvious, although wealth disparity is somewhat harder to quantify than income disparity. People have to report their incomes. People do not have to report their Chanel bags, Hermès scarves, Prada shoes, and Versace frocks. Also the value of such luxuries—not to mention the value of stocks, bonds, and real estate—fluctuates. (And people are subject to fibbing.)
Nonetheless, a search of what statistics are available about personal wealth indicates that the net worth of U.S. households is approximately $95 trillion and that the richest 10 percent of Americans own at least 75 percent of that wealth or, in round numbers, $71 trillion.
Now we’re talking real money. We’ll have plenty to give to the poor—$71 trillion. Oops, make that $69.5 trillion. (We forgot to subtract $1.5 billion in outstanding student loans.)
Also, we’ll have to pay off the U.S. national debt—$22 trillion. The reason we’ll have to pay off the national debt is that America’s top 10 percent of business owners, corporate executives, high tech savants, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals have given up on working for a living and are lazing around their beach houses (soon to be expropriated).
They’re not buying any Chanel bags, Hermès scarves, Prada shoes, and Versace frocks or Tesla Model X SUVs or Bertram yachts or Sub-Zero wine refrigerators. They’ve quit paying the landscaper and the pool service. They’re letting the grass grow and the Jacuzzi get scummy. They’ve fired the nanny and aren’t tipping the pizza delivery guy anymore.
This makes America’s economy so lousy that nobody will ever lend the U.S. government any money ever again. And everybody who has already lent the U.S. government money is sending bill collectors dunning us to pay the money back. So we’ll have to settle up the national debt—$22 trillion.
Okay, that still leaves us with $47.5 trillion to give to the poor.
But that will mean a much larger federal budget. It’s estimated that Medicare for All would cost $3.2 trillion a year. And a Universal Basic Income would cost $3.8 trillion a year. (Free college tuition is just a rounding error of about $70 billion a year. We won’t even count that.)
The Green New Deal is harder to price. It’s more of a letter to Santa than a piece of legislation. The “I want a pony” might mean an old Shetland free from the local animal shelter. Or it might mean a racehorse sired by Northern Dancer, selling for $26 million. But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself has mentioned a figure of $10 trillion over the next decade for the Green New Deal, and let’s take her word for it: $1 trillion a year.
So current spending of $4.75 trillion + $3.2 trillion + $3.8 trillion + $1 trillion = almost $13 trillion.
A Robin Hood president (assuming he or she has a Maid Marian House of Representatives and a Friar Tuck Senate) will have $47.5 trillion to give to the poor. But divide $47.5 trillion by $13 trillion and we see that all the money that all the rich people have will last three years and eight months—running out right at the end of Robin Hood’s four-year presidential term.
If Robin wants to get reelected, that band of Merry Men will have to invent some new kind of economic arithmetic, perhaps the kind of economic arithmetic they have in Venezuela.
On the Other Hand . . . Just Give Them the Money
What makes people poor has been debated for centuries by scholars, moralists, theorists, policy makers, and pundits like me—a bunch of idiots engaged in a huge waste of time. What makes people poor is not having money.
According to the U.S. Census there are 38.1 million poor people in America. These people are not poor because the federal government doesn’t spend money on poor people. It does.
The Congressional Research Service keeps track of these things. The CRS is a nonpartisan agency in the Library of Congress—serene and calm midst the political chaos of Washington. (Which is not so rare as one might think. Although some other nonpartisan federal agencies may be so serene and calm that they’ve nodded off at their desks, because the CRS figures below come with a note: “FY2016—most recent year for which federal spending data were available.”)
Anyway, the CRS has a report called “Federal Spending on Benefits and Services for People with Low Income.”
In the report we see that the federal government spends $877.5 billion annually on these benefits and services. And let us note that this spending does not include Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, or Affordable Care Act subsidies.
However, the $877.5 billion does include $467.8 billion spent on health care for the poor in programs such as Medicaid. Working on the assumption that 38.1 million poor people is bad enough, and that we don’t want them to be poor and sick, let’s not count health care costs as “benefits and services.” Let’s just call it common human decency.
Subtracting $467.8 billion from $877.5 billion leaves us with $409.7 billion. This is still a lot of money. Why does spending it on poor people seem to be so ineffective at eliminating poverty?
Maybe the answer is to be found, of all places, on the Republican House Budget Committee website, where the following statement appears:
There are at least 92 federal programs designed to help lower-income Americans. For instance, there are dozens of education and job-training programs, 17 different food-aid programs, and over 20 housing programs.
Many people may think that Republicans don’t want to “help low
er-income Americans.” I feel that’s harsh. But, for the sake of argument, let’s stipulate that Republicans don’t want to help. What interests me about their statement is not its implicit criticism of federal poverty program surfeit (explicit criticism follows). What interests me is the phrase, with italics added, “There are at least 92 federal programs . . .”
These are Republicans! We’ve just said—for the sake of argument—that they deplore poverty programs, that they want to get rid of them all. You’d think they’d be keeping careful track of each and every poverty program they want to eliminate. Yet even Republicans don’t know how many of these programs exist. Nobody does.
Just give poor people the money.
Divide $409.7 billion by 38.1 million and each poor person gets $10,753.28 a year. It’s not any more than we’re spending now. And it’s not like it’s going to make them stinking rich. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services puts the poverty line for an individual at $12,490 a year.
But there’s no law against poor people having a friend (although there may be some rule against it in one of the 92+ federal programs). And the HHS poverty line for a household of two is $16,910.
Buddy up and you get $21,507. And a household of four—current poverty line $25,750—gets $43,013.
Just give them the money.
No, I don’t know exactly how to do it. As a policy wonk I’m all wonk and no policy. But the government is damn efficient at taking away by means of payroll withholding, and I’m sure it can be equally efficient at handing out by payroll forthcoming. Or something like that.
Just give them the money.
It’s Time to Make Rich People Uncomfortable Again
Lately there has been a lot of anger and indignation about wealth inequality. Some blame this on . . . wealth inequality. I blame it on rich people in T-shirts.
I won’t mention Mark Zuckerberg by name. But, honestly, young man, you’re thirty-five years old, worth $72 billion, and you’re wearing what a preschooler would wear the first time he’s allowed to dress himself.
Yes, I’m also going around in an untucked “My Kid Went to College and All I Got Was This Lousy . . .” But I’ve earned it. Or, rather, I haven’t. I can’t afford a Savile Row morning suit, Turnbull & Asser dress shirt, Hermès cravat, and pair of bespoke John Lobb oxfords. And—taking out the trash, gassing up the car, and ordering an Egg McMuffin at the drive-through window—I wouldn’t be comfortable wearing them.
But Mark Zuckerberg in his Fruit of the Looms seems too comfortable. And this makes us mad.
There was a time when wealth was distributed far less equitably, but we weren’t as resentful of the rich. We resented our poverty, but we were relieved that we didn’t have to put on striped pants and spats to have breakfast.
Being rich looked very uncomfortable. Rich people’s clothes were stiff and starchy and they wore lots of them. Rich men were choked by tall collars and pinched by high-button shoes. Rich women were corseted to the point of kidney failure, constrained in so much crinoline and brocade that they might as well have been wearing off-the-shoulder burqas, and encumbered by bustles large enough that they couldn’t turn sideways without knocking over a footman and the parlor maid.
Now we have Jeff Bezos in a New Kids on the Block bomber jacket, Bill Gates outfitted in Mr. Rogers sweaters and Gloria Steinem’s old aviators and cutting his own hair, Elon Musk smoking pot on TV, and Richard Branson looking like the guy at the end of the bar muttering lines from The Big Lebowski. That’s not counting the various plutocrats caught in Us and the Star wearing nothing much at all.
If rich people start getting any more comfortable police will be shooing them off park benches.
Rich people are also having fun—flying their own rocketships, sending lewd selfies, buying private islands (Manhattan, for example). Having fun was something rich people didn’t used to do, at least not as far as we poor people could tell.
They went to the opera. It was like Vaudeville except without the tap dancing, acrobatics, magic tricks, and jokes. (If opera did have jokes they were sung in a foreign language and nobody got the punch lines.)
Rich people—and there were supposedly only Four Hundred of them—gathered in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. They waltzed like sticks in the mud to music that would put the dead to sleep and ate and drank tiny things from tiny plates and glasses. They never knocked the bung out of the beer keg, danced a polka, or sang
Your baby has gone down the drain hole,
Your baby has gone down the plug,
The poor little thing was so skinny and thin
He should have been bathed in a jug!
Being rich meant living in a big drafty house with no privacy because the footman and parlor maid you clobbered with your bustle were always poking around. The rooms had odd names, such as “conservatory,” “lavatory,” “butler’s pantry.” (Was the butler in there panting? What was he up to that caused him to be short of breath?)
You had to wait to eat dinner until 8 p.m. Table manners were complicated. Which knife do you use to eat peas? And strange foods were served—terrapin soup (boiled turtle), shad roe (eggs that not only weren’t fried but came from a fish), and pheasant under glass (dangerously breakable).
Rich people trying to have fun didn’t look like much fun either. They got soaked in their yachts, broke their necks on their polo ponies, and wore themselves to a frazzle walking all over tarnation hitting things with a stick for no reason in a game called golf.
Even when relaxing they had to get dressed up according to strict social protocol. If you showed up to a yacht race wearing plus fours and a tam-o’-shanter Commodore Vanderbilt would dunk you.
These days rich people are behaving just like the rest of us. Or just like the rest of us would if we were rich. The trouble is we can’t afford to be rich slobs the way rich slobs can. They’re not satisfied with having all the money. They want all the fun too. And that’s not fair.
Let’s make rich people uncomfortable again. Maybe tax the dickens out of them. But somehow taxation never enriches me. Let’s require everyone with a net worth over $100 million to wear a top hat at all times. This does nothing to fix income inequality but what a swell target for snowballs, brickbats, and rotten fruit.
Negative Rights vs. Positive Rights
It’s Positively Confusing
There’s a reason why so much political thinking starts out in the neighborhood of Idealism, crosses Naive Street, and winds up in Stupid.
The reason is confusion between “negative” rights and “positive” rights. We all agree that rights are wonderful and we’ve got a lot of them—at least in this country—and we should get a lot more.
But there are two kinds of rights: Getoutta Here Rights and Gimmie Rights. Or, as they’re called in political theory, Negative Rights and Positive Rights.
Negative Rights are our rights to be left alone—to do, be, think, say (and buy and sell) whatever we want as long as our behavior doesn’t cause real harms. (Microaggressions don’t count unless you were somehow infected by a salmonella microbe in the process of being brushed off at the food co-op for not bringing your own re-usable shopping bag.)
Positive Rights are our rights to real goods—our right to get things. The right to education. The right to health care. The right to a living wage. Et cetera.
Negative Rights are front and center in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence: “certain unalienable rights . . . Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” All ten rights in the of Bill of Rights are Negative Rights (except, maybe, the Sixth and Seventh Amendment Positive Right to a jury if you’re put on trial for violating other people’s Negative Rights by giving them food poisoning).
Positive Rights are front and center in political activism protests and politicians’ election campaigns—“A chicken in every pot.” (That was a Republican slogan in the 1928 presid
ential race. It would come back to peck the Republicans in 1932.)
This chicken isn’t mentioned in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence because our founding fathers—savvy political thinkers—would have asked, “Where did the chicken come from? Who did it belong to before? How did the chicken get into every pot, apparently for free, without impairing someone’s right to make a living as a chicken farmer?”
Your right to do, be, think, and say in no way impinges on anyone else’s right to do, be, think, or say. And, if you have even a rudimentary understanding of free market economics, you know that your right to buy and sell doesn’t impinge on the buying and selling rights of others.
But your right to physical items, such as a free education, impinges on everybody. In order for you to be given a thing, that thing (or some tax-and-spend portion of it) has to be taken from somebody else. The person from whom the thing is taken loses negative rights so that you can gain positive ones.
This is not to say that Negative Rights are always wonderful or ought to be unlimited in scope. You have the right to stand on a street corner and say, “I’m a Nazi pig!” Whether you have the right to stand on a street corner and say to passersby, “You’re a Nazi pig!” is a more complicated question. And if you stand on a street corner with a bullhorn and yell, “YOU’RE A NAZI PIG!” in the middle of the night the police should come and negate your negative right with a pair of handcuffs.
Nor are Positive Rights evil. Free public primary and secondary schools are a benefit to society. (Although vouchers for private school tuition might be more beneficial.) And I’m in favor of college degrees that are at least reasonably priced. (I got government help paying for school. And not because of academic merit. The government’s attitude in my day was “America needs Mediocre Students Too.”) I believe America should have a medical system that guarantees everyone treatment without going bankrupt from hospital bills. (Nobody should lose the house. The boat? Maybe. But not the house.) And decent pay for every job ($12 an hour for congressmen) is a worthy goal even if I think an expanding economy is more likely than a law to provide generous paychecks without driving people into the labor black market. (E.g., congressmen getting paid under the table—except that seems to be happening already.)
A Cry from the Far Middle Page 6