PaSwede

No, as scientists, it's absolutely untrue that "our job is to come up with solutions". That you would think it is is actually very revealing about your conception of science as advocacy, and thus how seriously we should be taking your analyses.

A couple long winded thoughts on the Bernie Sanders billionaire tax discourse: 1. Sanders likes to cite the Nordics as a model, but really none of those countries finance broad-based social welfare programs through wealth taxes on a tiny elite, as he proposed yesterday. You could obviously make the case: This is a pure messaging bill, so who really cares? But if this is really about creating a vision for where the country needs to go, this path has problems the Nordics avoid. Making long term social programs like Medicare expansion and universal childcare dependent on an uncertain short term funding tax base (as he proposes) is a different thing. If it works as you want, you’re eroding the funding base for your social programs. You can still do the massive billionaire tax on political economy and moral economy grounds. It is the opposite, eg, of what Sanders did in 2020, when he stuck by the idea that Medicare for all would require some middle class tax hikes. Why muddle the existing Nordic project with a billionaire tax — when you could propose both separately? 2. There’s been a lot of talk about the failure of wealth taxes elsewhere. Those comments are fair enough, and I’m sure nobody really knows how much revenue this would generate. But there also seems to be something … dare I say … a touch unpatriotic in some of the criticisms? Wealth taxes have failed elsewhere, yes. But a national wealth tax has never been tried here, and the difference matters. The US is not Switzerland. We have the world’s biggest economy and an enormous/punitive exit tax. We don’t have the collective action problem of a state or EU country; billionaires are not corporations. Capital has international reach, sure. But so does the world’s largest empire