Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A Boston-based company is in the news: “Gillette #MeToo ad on ‘toxic masculinity’ gets praise – and abuse; Backlash includes call for boycott of P&G, complaining commercial ‘emasculates men’” (Guardian).

As someone too old and unhip to have a beard, I’ve been a loyal Gillette customer for decades. Now it seems that there is a virtue offset bonus. Gillette will take some of its spectacular gross margin on every blade and use it to educate un-woke men on how to behave.

What about for the guys who aren’t happy to support Gillette’s new crusade? Can they buy a blade system that is actually as good or better? If so, what is it and who makes it? Are there any multi-subject tests to show that one brand is actually better than another? I found this comparison that concluded the Korean-made Dorco Pace 7 is superior to Gillette’s best, but it is just one guy (the Koreans are better at making TVs, ships, and smartphones than we are, so why shouldn’t they also be better at making razors?).

Related:

• Dorco Pace 7 at Amazon (searching for “Gillette” within the reviews reveals that some people prefer the Dorco and others went back to Gillette)

“What a Top Income-Tax Rate of 70% Would Mean for the Economy” (Barron’s) is a bit surprising, considering that the publication is targeted at the same rich investors that would get hit by any tax rate increases. The author points out that the no-extra-tax states aren’t able to gather up all of the rich bastards:

Top-earning Americans have shown surprisingly little appetite to move from high-tax jurisdictions, such as California (top state-tax rate: 13.3%) and New York City (top state and local rate: 12.7%), to states with no income tax. The people who tend to leave California and New York for Nevada and Texas are poor and middle-class workers in search of affordable housing, rather than rich people seeking lower taxes, according to Lyman Stone’s analysis of data from the U.S. Census and the Internal Revenue Service.

Ergo, a person who is getting hit with an 83.3 percent income tax (70% federal plus 13.3% California) will just pay it. As with https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/06/01/book-review-the-redistribution-recession/ the article points out that we already have some super high tax rates in the U.S. …. on the poor:

Making matters worse is that “means-tested” benefits are withdrawn as income rises. The net result is that the poor and middle class often face effective marginal tax rates equivalent to or higher than what Ocasio-Cortez has proposed for the rich. According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, a typical married couple with two children pays an effective marginal tax rate of 78% as wages rise from $30,000 to $60,000, while a single parent with one child pays an effective marginal tax rate of 69% as wages rise from $22,000 to $42,000. These implicit taxes are huge disincentives to work and affect many more people than tax proposals aimed at the top 10,000th of the distribution. 

(The rate actually reached over 100 percent during the Obama Administration when mortgage payment relief was factored in; see the above link to The Redistribution Recession book review.)

See also John Cochrane’s calculation that, due to property tax liabilities, the top marginal tax rate in the U.S. is already over 70 percent, and his analysis of optimum rates.

I still think that this is a pipe dream unless capital gains taxes are also raised to 70-83 percent. Otherwise people can just come up with ways to convert ordinary income into capital gains, as was conventional in the 1950s. (And can it really work to have 70-83 percent capital gains taxes in the U.S. when “socialist” Denmark maxes out at 42 percent (Deloitte) and when London is at 10 percent (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/01/02/move-to-the-uk-if-youre-an-entrepreneur-10-percent-capital-gains-tax/))?

Readers: What do you think it means when even Barron’s is saying that maybe a 70+ percent tax rate will be optimum? (Of course, as someone who earns less than the proposed income threshold for this new rate, I personally think that a rate of closer to 100 percent would be fair!)

The Vanguard FTSE All-World ex-US Small-Cap Index Fund shows that its fifth largest holding is Canopy Growth Corp. Some sort of real estate holding company? Wikipedia: “Canopy Growth Corporation, formerly Tweed Marijuana Inc., is a cannabis company based in Smiths Falls, Ontario, …”

I don’t like this purported “industry” (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/06/08/legal-marijuana-questions-1-why-does-it-cost-more-than-spinach/) because I can’t see any sustainable competitive advantage in growing marijuana (any more than spinach). As a mutual fund investor, though, am I doomed to be a shareholder?

[Separately, this fund has a 0.25% annual expense ratio. The equivalent ETF, also from Vanguard, charges 0.13%. Wouldn’t they actually prefer people to hold the fund rather than trade in and out of the ETF?]

At one of our dinners-for-8 on Empress of the Seas, a lively fellow told us about his life in The Villages and how he could be more popular with women if he were a dancer. He said that he was just getting out of a marriage that began in 2015: “I’ve been single, married, widowed, single, half-single, married again, and now divorced.” (his three–year marriage isn’t long enough to trigger Florida’s permanent alimony provisions)

An Irish passenger explained that the Irish tradition is for adult sons to build houses on their parents’ land and thus settle down with their kids right next to the grandparents. As a significant chunk of land may be only 1 acre, the houses are quite close to each other. This system worked well for centuries, but with today’s no-fault divorce law a common outcome is that the daughter-in-law divorces the son and the Irish family court will award the house and children to the mother. “The son has to move out and the grandparents now find themselves across the garden from an unrelated female and her new boyfriend.”

The government that says it is working to reduce inequality eliminates low-skill low-wage cashier jobs via touch-screen ordering kiosks… (Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex cafeteria):

I posted this on Facebook and it attracted the following comment from a New York City resident:

I don’t see a problem with eliminating jobs. Most jobs are going to be eliminated over the coming years including high paying white collar jobs. Eliminating jobs is simply accelerating a society with a guaranteed minimum income.

So it is okay if folks who want to work as cashiers can’t get jobs and/or must accept lower wages (due to lower demand) for a period of some years because it will usher in the glorious future of guaranteed minimum income. (See https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/11/30/long-term-effects-of-short-term-free-cash-guaranteed-minimum-income-experiments/ for how we actually did have guaranteed minimum income in the U.S. for a few years)