How to stop the plutocracy game: index the top 1%’s tax rates to decreasing inequality
Wealth and inheritance taxes are front and center in the debate about how to attack extreme inequality. Another way to use the tax system to attack inequality and the incentives for wage suppression: index the tax rates on the top 1% of earners to the Gini Coefficient measure of inequality. Gini measures zero in a state of total equality and 1.0 if one person makes all income. Examples of current Gini Coefficients:
USA: .485, South Africa: .64, Nordic countries: .25-.28, Latvia, Israel, Portugal: .38, Germany: .31.
“The United States has a Gini coefficient of 0.485, the highest it has been in 50 years according to the United States Census Bureau. In 2015, the top 1% of earners in the United States averaged 40 times more income than the bottom 90%” — https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gini-coefficient-by-country . The bottom 50% of the population owns less than the richest 26 billionaires.
USA Gini in 1967: .36. The trend is not our friend, unless you’re in the top 1% or .1%.
This idea is a politically neutral-sounding tax rate index or coefficient that could narrow the political valley of death that makes all wealth redistribution measures dead on arrival in the gerrymandered American political system.
The rest of this article is now on my Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/lestergolden/p/how-to-stop-the-plutocracy-game?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
