By Polly Cleveland
Inequality has surged in the U.S. over the last forty years; many observers now blame the deregulation and tax cuts for the rich starting with the presidency of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In his new short book, Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know, James Galbraith explains how this happened through the change in U.S industrial structure:
All of this changed with the tax “reform” movements of the 1970s and 1980s, which pushed for lower top marginal tax rates, fewer special exemptions from the tax, and for a “shareholder-value” model of corporate compensation. And a special feature of this change was that it created strong incentives to restructure the corporation itself.
“In particular, as the digital revolution came into view, the top technologists in the big corporations realized that they would be far better off if they set off on their own, incorporated themselves as independent technology firms, and then sold their output back to the companies for which they had formerly worked in salaried jobs.…
The effect of this structural transformation on the distribution of household incomes in the United States, as recorded in the tax records, is astonishing. For there were created, mainly in the 1990s, a handful of citadels of stratospheric incomes, previously unknown in the country and concentrated in the tiny handful of locations. One of these was Manhattan, the home of Wall Street and the source of finance. A second was Silicon Valley, a cluster of counties in Northern California. And the third was Seattle, Washington, and its near suburbs.”
Galbraith is describing the same phenomenon that Barry Lynn documented at length in his chilling 2010 exposé: Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction. That is, the transformation from vertically integrated firms to horizontally-integrated monopolistic trading companies, buying inputs from all over the world, squeezing both their suppliers and their customers. But Galbraith adds a new insight: not only did the postwar high-tax regime induce corporations to keep executive pay in check, it also induced them to retain profits and reinvest them in the corporation. With the 1980’s “greed is good” transformation, rates of reinvestment slowed as executives started taking more for themselves—surely helping slow the overall rate of growth.
Wait a moment! High taxes on income and profit produced more investment and growth? That’s the exact opposite of today’s Republican, and often Democratic, mantra that high taxes kill investment and growth. But the postwar taxes that tamed the corporate behemoths were in fact high marginal rates, top rates in a steeply progressive system. These were the very taxes imposed at the beginning of World War II to prevent war profiteering. These were taxes designed to capture the “unearned income” or “economic rent” of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals. It was perfectly logical for such corporations and individuals to “avoid” such taxes by investing money they would otherwise lose.
If high marginal income and profit taxes are so beneficial, is there any prospect—given the political will— of returning to such tax levels? Unfortunately, now that so many multinational corporations and wealthy individuals are registered or domiciled in tax haven countries, any simple effort to impose truly high marginal rates on profits or income will simply lead to more creative evasions, corruption (see Panama), and tax wars.
But, assuming the political will, are there other approaches? Galbraith proposes:
Land taxation has been for a century the program of the followers of the 19th century American economist Henry George, whose influence was vast around the world a century ago. One of his followers was the Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-Sen, founder of the Republic of China in 1911. And Maoist China, by conducting an early war against landlords, ended up having the world economy most like the Georgist program in the modern age. But instead of taxing land value, the Chinese state actually owns it, and collects the land rent for itself. By doing this, Chinese municipalities and provinces have enjoyed ample revenue from which to make capital improvements, which is why Chinese cities have been able to grow like weeds in the reform era…
To this I would add that land taxes weren’t new in China: they financed Chinese empires as early as 2000 BC. Stiff land taxes of four shillings to the pound of assessed value financed the transformation of British finance in 1688; Adam Smith deemed them “the most equitable of all taxes.” Taxes on high profits and incomes and on land values all capture unearned income, or rents, forcing taxpayers to invest productively to pay the tax.