{"id":778,"date":"2007-02-05T22:14:44","date_gmt":"2007-02-06T02:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/05\/bono-u2-and-the-rest-of-us-voting-our-p"},"modified":"2007-02-05T22:14:44","modified_gmt":"2007-02-06T02:14:44","slug":"bono-u2-and-the-rest-of-us-voting-our-pocketbooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2007\/02\/05\/bono-u2-and-the-rest-of-us-voting-our-pocketbooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Bono, U2, and the rest of us voting our pocketbooks"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Sunday New York Times business section carries an article about tax shelters in the Netherlands<\/a> for people such as writers, artists, musicians, and other entities who get most of their income from royalties; in the aggregate, these folks are able to escape tax on approximately $1 trillion in annual income.\u00a0 With a little creative accounting and legal work, the effective tax rate can be reduced to 1.5 percent.\u00a0 Bono and U2, the billionaire advocates for greater aid by rich world governments to people in poor countries, have not had to worry about this until recently.\u00a0 Ireland has long exempted all income by musicians, writers, and artists.\u00a0 Bono was thus out there advocating the spending of tax revenues to which he himself had not contributed.\u00a0 Ireland is going to start taxing royalty income over $320,000 per person per year, which has led Bono and U2 to migrate their royalty-generating properties to the Netherlands.\u00a0 The article talks about how Bono is taking criticism as a hypocrite for advocating massive tax-funded relief schemes when he himself has never paid any taxes.<\/p>\n

Is Bono unusual for voting his pocketbook?<\/p>\n

I thought about the people I know who are relatively well-off.\u00a0 They are more or less evenly divided between Republican and Democrat, but the division is not random.\u00a0 Those who get their money every year as a salary tend to be Democrats.\u00a0 Those who start small businesses and\u00a0get their money\u00a0in big lumps as capital gains when they sell those businesses tend to support the Republicans.\u00a0 If you are a W2 employee with a high income, it turns out that it doesn’t cost you much to rail against Bush’s idiocy and the unfairness of heterosexual-only marriage.\u00a0 Proposed tax rates on ordinary income are very similar from the two parties.\u00a0 On the other hand, the Reagan capital gains tax cuts were dramatic, making it much more lucrative to start, grow, and eventually sell\u00a0a company.\u00a0 A small business guy who says “I hate the Republicans” is saying “I am so enthusiastic about the teaching of Evolution in Kansas schools that I want to pay twice as much in taxes.”<\/p>\n

Politicial scientists have found that the correlation between income and party affiliation isn’t all that strong, but they were looking at ordinary income where the tax policies of the parties aren’t very different.\u00a0 I wonder if people who made most of their money via capital gains disproportionately support the Republicans….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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