Warm up the Helicopter of Happiness
Here is a letter from a reader:
Hi David,
Long-time reader of yours. You put out some of the best blog content on the web and I am grateful for that.
I’ve got a question I’d hope you consider answering in the blog. I’m almost embarrassed to ask it, for fear of appearing facile, but here goes:
Our economy is struggling with a lack of aggregate demand, low monetary velocity, and a whiff of deflation. QE does not seem to be transmitting its monetary effects to the real economy, just helping to inflate asset prices instead. So why wouldn’t we consider sending direct stimulus to households, similar to what we did in 2008-09, only on a much bigger scale? Say there are 120MM households. Send each one a $5k check, and if I’ve got the zeroes right, that’s a “mere” $600B we’re borrowing to disburse – about 60% of what the Fed is doing annually with QE. Most of the money would recycle and multiply quickly to the economy (net of what gets allocated to debt paydown, and what gets banked by the well-off). And due to some current one-times in the Federal budget, we’ve actually got a better balance sheet in the moment to do something with added borrowing/spending.
Crazy thought, but these are uncommon times. Curious what you think.
Dear friend, I think about this in two ways: ethics and metaphysics. The metaphysics are easy — yeah, let the Fed remit all of its seigniorage to the people rather than to the Treasury. Far better than letting the government spend it.
But the ethics are touchy. How do we define ethical taxation systems? My view is that people should be taxed according to their increase in net worth, and at a flat rate, but with no ability to defer income from taxation. Most wealthy people don’t care about tax rates because they can find ways to defer/reduce taxable income. This is a major reason why you should distrust the Democrats, because their desire to raise tax rates would do little. This is also a reason to distrust the GOP, because there is no decent reason to decrease tax rates.
We need to tighten up the definition of income in the US, and no longer allow citizens and businesses to defer income. If we taxed all economic activity as it occurred we would have balanced budgets.
The rich aren’t paying enough in the US, not because of tax rates, but because they can hide their income. That is the way that policy should proceed, to make the wealthy pay according to their increase in net worth.
I’ll write about this more later, but the main idea is to tax people proportionate to their increase in wealth. That is the Bible’s solution for how people should give.
Warm up the Helicopter of Happiness was originally published on The Aleph Blog