Review: Brian Cox gets back to his roots on How The Other Half Live

The Data Are Clear: Work Less, Be More Productive

If a four-day workweek were made the federal standard, working less would no longer be a disruptive experiment undertaken by a few startups. Instead, it would be an option that employers would have to justify not offering—a justification that might become harder to sustain as more studies indicate the potential benefits of fewer workdays. - The New Yorker

It is time to tax the rich… and their foundations

Philanthropic endowments are designed to protect the financial interests of the 1 percent. They should be taxed.

Rich people pay virtually no tax (often 3 percent or less of their income) and their billions just keep on growing through the application of compound interest. In the next 20 years, most of this wealth will move between family members in the wealthiest 1 percent. In the US alone, it is estimated that between $36 trillion and $70 trillion in wealth will be transferred from one generation to another.

Calls to tax the rich are growing globally, and will be even more pronounced as this massive generational wealth transfer takes place. One of the key ways the rich address this pressure is through philanthropy. Philanthropic contributions are commended and perceived as a form of “giving back”.

Currently, the estimated global value of philanthropy is $2.3 trillion, or approximately 2 percent of the world’s GDP, with most of those funds held in endowments. This is larger than the annual GDP of countries like Canada and Brazil.

If philanthropy is inherently good, and more philanthropy is going to happen, what is there to worry about? Let us look at how philanthropy actually works in practice…

A recent investigative report by The Nation magazine estimated that Bill Gates may have received more money back in the form of tax breaks than he has given in philanthropic grants through the activities of the Gates Foundation.

Another example involves MacKenzie Scott, one of the largest philanthropic donors in the US. Over the past couple of years, she has been celebrated for the size, type and speed of her grants. According to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, in 2023, her wealth continued to grow, even though she gave away significant funds.

Despite receiving huge tax benefits and doling out the smallest fraction of their endowments as grants, philanthropists are elevated in our society as benevolent, generous, and magnanimous individuals.

It is time to drop the hero worship of philanthropists and go beyond simple declarations to tax the rich. We need to start taxing endowments.

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Why Cutting IRS Funding Is Not a Conservative Move, by Brian Riedl (Manhattan Institute):

Last year, President Biden and congressional Democrats enacted $80 billion in new IRS funding for the next decade. During the debt limit debate earlier this year, Republicans successfully negotiated a $20 billion cut in that funding. And now, in the appropriations showdown, they’re going after the rest of it.

The IRS has long been an easy and popular target, because few of us enjoy paying taxes. And the agency has invited criticism with its history of overzealous audits, including a heavy-handed targeting of conservative nonprofit organizationsduring the Obama administration that fueled the latest round of GOP cuts.

However, defunding and weakening the IRS is not conservative. To the contrary, it will ultimately drive up deficits and raise middle-class taxes.

Between 2010 and 2021, the inflation-adjusted IRS budget fell by nearly one-quarter, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Tax enforcement staff declined by 31 percent, and the number of revenue agents collapsed to 1954 levels — even as the taxpaying population doubled, and the tax code grew vastly more complex. Thus, during the 2010s, audit rates fell by 54 percent for large corporations and 71 percent for millionaires.

Consequently, the amount of unpaid taxes has jumped to $625 billion per year, driven heavily by the underreporting of corporate and pass-through business income. ...

[D]efunding the IRS costs the government money because each dollar in tax enforcement spending brings in as much as $5 to $9 in unpaid taxes. ...  The original $80 billion in new IRS funding — to be split between taxpayer services, operations, modernization and tax enforcement focused on upper-income taxpayers — was projected to bring in $180 billion over the decade.

We need this revenue. My fellow fiscal conservatives must grasp the inescapable truth that in the long term, federal taxes are headed upward. Annual budget deficits now exceed $2 trillion and will surpass $3 trillion within a decade. ...

Curtailing IRS abuses does not require tolerating $625 billion in annual tax evasion. That’s an expense we can no longer afford.