“Wealth and Poverty” Class 7: How to make America fairer? From PRE-distribution to RE-distribution

Friends,

It’s appropriate that with tomorrow’s midterm elections, our “Wealth and Poverty” course turns this week to public policies that are either reducing or widening inequalities of income and wealth.

The first and most obvious (and most politically contentious) involves taxation.

My goal today is to get you to reexamine your assumptions about how the system of taxation actually works, as well as how the proceeds are redistributed.

In case you missed them, here are the classes that have been released so far: Class 1, Class 2, Class 3, Class 4, Class 5, and Class 6.

For Class 7, just double-click on the video below, and you’re in the seventh week of class.

The questions I’ll be focusing on this week are:

• Should the top marginal tax rate be raised?

• Should wealth be taxed?

• In what ways is income now redistributed?

• To what extent is it redistributed upward, from the poor or the lower-middle class to the upper-middle and the rich?

• What’s the difference between redistribution policies that focus on taxes and those that focus on the beneficiaries of government programs financed by taxes?

Recommended readings (just click on the link):

• Jesse Eisinger et al., “The Secret IRS Files,” ProPublica;

• Anu Partanen, “What Americans Don’t Get About Nordic Countries,” The Atlantic;

• Chye-Ching Huang and Roderick Taylor, “How the Federal Tax Code Can Better Advance Racial Equity,” Center on Budget and Policy Priorities;

• Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Chapters 14-15.

For a full list of readings and the student handout for today’s class, you can visit the course website here.

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A huge thanks to the Wealth and Poverty team — to Michael Lahanas-Calderón, Kyle Parker, Dan Davis, and Emmett Tjen — as well as Coro Fellows Ammar Ansari and Meagan Turner for preparing these course materials to be shared with all of you. And to Heather Kinlaw Lofthouse for making all this happen on this page.