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Posts Tagged ‘John McCain’

There Will Be Rich Always: Finding a New Way to Think About Income Inequality

On Monday, Aaron Edlin and I published a cri de coeur op-ed in the New York Times calling for a Brandeis tax, an automatic tax that would put the brakes on income inequality. In the next few days, Aaron and I will be publishing a series of posts explaining more about our rationale and providing more details on how a Brandeis tax might be implemented.

There Will Be Rich Always
By Ian Ayres & Aaron Edlin

In one of the more memorable lyrics from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar (based on Matthew 26:11), Jesus tells his disciples “There will be poor always.”

The same is true of the rich. There will always be a top 1 percent of income earners. But what it takes to be rich can change drastically over the course of even a single generation. In 1980, you would have had to earn at least $158,000 to be a one-percenter; but by 2006 the qualifying amount had more than doubled to $332,000. (You can produce an estimate of your own household income percentile – albeit using a different definition of income that produces a much higher 1 percent cutoff – at this wsj.com site.) The rise is not due to inflation as both these numbers are expressed in inflation-adjusted, constant 2006 dollars.


What’s Wrong With Economists?

You probably recall Hillary Clinton turning anti-economist in the dying days of her campaign: “Well I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists.” And more recently John McCain has jumped aboard: “I trust the people and not the so-called economists to give the American people a little relief.” Honestly, I don’t get it. So . . .


Crunching the Numbers on Sounding Presidential: A Guest Post

One of the really fun innovations in this election cycle is the extent to which the speech of the candidates has now become grist for statistical analysis. For instance, the Times’ “Caucus” blog reports that Reagan’s name was invoked 53 times last night, and by this measure Romney beat McCain 19 to 12. The Times has now set up a . . .


Straight Talk About Book Publishing From John McCain

From a Q&A with John McCain in today’s N.Y. Times Magazine: Q. Well, maybe you will strike it rich with your coming book, “Hard Call: Great Decisions and the Extraordinary People Who Made Them.” How did you have time to write a 450-page look at history? A. Mark Salter, my co-writer, did it. What we usually do is use a . . .