Bill Burr tells Americans to chill out regarding the election result:”If you liked Obama did he call you at all in the last eight years? Did he ever put a sandwich on your table?”
Separately, our local school superintendant sent out an announcement of a talk titled “How to talk with your children about the election and its aftermath”:
From the campaign, through the election week and now to the next phase, people have repeatedly asked the question, “How do I talk to my kids about this?” Please join us for a discussion around these issues. The conversation will be facilitated by Hedley Q. Shrinker, PhD, a licensed psychologist (and Happy Valley parent) who has worked with parents and families in ordinary times as well as in extraordinary times (9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Boxing Day Tsunami).
Some closeted non-Hillary-supporters drafted questions for the good doctor:
- How do we explain to Devon and Courtney that they’re going to inherit twice as much money if Trump is able to persuade Congress to eliminate the estate tax?
- How do we explain to Kate that she won’t need to create offshore intellectual property vehicles the way that Apple has because Trump is going to lower the corporate income tax rate?
- How do we tell Marina that she won’t need to stock up on guns and ammo because Trump will preserve her Second Amendment rights?
One friend noted that “I talked to my kids about Trump. They are not white so they are supposed to be scared. I woke them up and said ‘Guess what? Trump won.’ [The 7-year-old girl] said ‘Well, Hillary does lie a lot.'”
Related:
– Why should Devon and Courtney inherit unlimited amounts of money? Do we really want the US to become a nation with elite dynasties that become the equivalent of hereditary monarchs?
– If we lower the corporate income tax, someone else will go even lower. Where does it stop?
– Who was trying to take her guns away? It wasn’t Hillary.
FL: Why would a cash-hungry government want to cut estate tax rates? To keep high-income people working longer and paying income taxes. See http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/economy/10view.html for how the estate tax discourages older high-income people from continuing to work. High-skill, high-income retirees are even worse for economic growth than pushing low skilled Americans out of the labor force via higher minimum wages, enhanced welfare, etc.
A reduced estate tax also keeps money invested in taxable entities rather than drained off into non-profits, many of which will send the money overseas (see the Gates Foundation, for example). Consider the rich person who puts the money into a foundation that spends money in South America or Africa and/or removes real estate from the property tax rolls here. Suppose instead the rich person had handed the money down to children who kept it invested in for-profit corporations, used it to purchase luxury real estate (2 percent of the value taxed away every year via property tax), and used it to pay for services. In which case did the government get more tax revenue?
How low can corporate income tax go? It is already 0% in Estonia, an EU country, which restricts taxation to distributed profits (i.e., dividends). According to the Eurocrats, Apple is already paying close 0% on its European profits; see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-01/pinning-down-apple-s-alleged-0-005-tax-rate-mission-impossible
https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/gun-violence-prevention/ is where Hillary set forth her plan for “Gun violence prevention” by stripping various Americans of what would have been previously considered their Second Amendment rights.
Bill Burr has a sense of humor, which is pretty rare for a stand-up comedian.
Are those real questions? Too funny!
Some people may think to keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals and the seriously mentally ill is a violation of their rights, but those people should just be ignored.
‘Guess what? Trump won.’ [The 7-year-old girl] said ‘Well, Hillary does lie a lot.’” – Perfect!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/business/economy/10view.html
aside from the grand sample total of 1, I thought the only rational behaviour is ‘more money is better, even if it not that much more’. So the author is just saying ‘I am too lazy and not motivated enough to earn more and leave my kids more money (because leaving them any more is better than nothing), so I want my salary to be effectively increased before I get off my lazy ass’. I do agree that asking for a raise is something people should always do (why not?). But, if one can earn more than 0, not doing so is just laziness.
Alternatively we can just accept that past a specific point in earnings any further earning must be bigger than a specific value to be worth the hassle (I say ‘specific’ because different people will have different thresholds). Turning this very human foible into policy seems mindbendingly stupid.
Federico: Econ 101 does not hold that “the only rational behaviour is ‘more money is better, even if it not that much more’. ” If that were true, regardless of working hours and effort required, everyone with a 9-5 M-F job would seek a second job on weeknights and a third job on weekends. Successful alimony and child support plaintiffs would work the same number of hours as they had before they won their lawsuits. There are an extensive bodies of research on how humans value leisure time, on how humans make retirement decisions, and on how humans adjust their working hours in response to tax rates.
See http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/06/01/book-review-the-redistribution-recession/ for how people at the low end of the income spectrum adjust working hours in response to implicit tax rates determined by welfare programs.
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/20060222_DavisandHenrekson.pdf summarizes the literature for middle-income citizens.
I’m not sure that there is any good data for high-income people such as Mankiw. Part of that is due to the fact that high-income people may be able to escape high nominal tax rates. See http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/11/your-money/irs-is-looking-into-captive-insurance-shelters.html and http://www.barrons.com/articles/warren-buffetts-nifty-tax-loophole-1428726092 for example.
Hedley Q. Shrinker: That’s one of those Car-talk style joke names, right? (Like my lawyers at Dewey, Cheatham and Howe)
Phil, maybe it’s the elections or maybe the folks in the colonies abandoned the motherland before irony was invented – we can rest assured I do accept people value their leisure time. Thus, letting people keep more or their income does not guarantee in any way they will be motivated to do more work or invest their money in some way or some other. In fact they might actually work less and still not spend the windfall by buying stuff locally and thus contributing to the tax pot through value added or sale taxes. They might just buy online in a different county.
FL: “Do we really want the US to become a nation with elite dynasties that become the equivalent of hereditary monarchs?”
I thought you were talking about the Clintons at first.