A New Year's Resolution for the Rich

While the United States has suffered the worst recession in living
memory, I find that I have very few financial concerns. Many of my
friends are in the same position: Most of us attended private schools
and good universities, and we will be able to provide these same
opportunities to our own children. No one in my immediate circle has a
family member serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. In fact, in the aftermath
of September 11th, 2001, the only sacrifice we were asked to make for
our beloved country was to go shopping. Nearly a decade has passed, with
our nation's influence and infrastructure crumbling by the hour, and
yet those of us who have been so fortunate as to actually live the
American dream--rather than merely dream it--have been spared every
inconvenience. Now we are told that we will soon receive a large tax cut
for all our troubles. What is the word for the feeling this provokes in
me? Imagine being safely seated in lifeboat, while countless others
drown, only to learn that another lifeboat has been secured to take your
luggage to shore...

Most Americans believe that a person should enjoy the full fruits of
his or her labors, however abundant. In this light, taxation tends to be
seen as an intrinsic evil. It is worth noting, however, that throughout
the 1950's--a decade for which American conservatives pretend to feel a
harrowing sense of nostalgia--the marginal tax rate for the wealthy was
over 90 percent. In fact, prior to the 1980's it never dipped below 70
percent. Since 1982, however, it has come down by half. In the meantime,
the average net worth of the richest 1 percent of Americans has doubled
(to $18.5 million), while that of the poorest 40 percent has fallen by
63 percent (to $2,200). Thirty years ago, top U.S. executives made about
50 times the salary of their average employees. In 2007, the average
worker would have had to toil for 1,100 years to earn what his CEO brought home between Christmas in Aspen and Christmas on St. Barthes.

We now live in a country in which the bottom 40 percent (120 million people) owns just 0.3 percent
of the wealth. Data of this kind make one feel that one is
participating in a vast psychological experiment: Just how much
inequality can free people endure? Have you seen Ralph Lauren's car collection?
Yes, it is beautiful. It also cost hundreds of millions of dollars. "So
what?" many people will say. "It's his money. He earned it. He should
be able to do whatever he wants with it." In conservative circles,
expressing any doubt on this point has long been synonymous with
Marxism.

And yet over one million American children are now homeless. People on Medicare are being denied life-saving organ transplants that were routinely covered before the recession. Over one quarter of our nation's bridges are structurally deficient. When might be a convenient time to ask the richest Americans to help solve problems of this kind? How about now?

It is easy to understand why even the most generous person might be
averse to paying taxes: Our legislative process has been hostage to
short-term political interests and other perverse incentives for as long
as anyone can remember. Consequently, our government wastes an
extraordinary amount of money. It also seems uncontroversial to say
that whatever can be best accomplished in the private sector should be.
Our tax code must also be reformed--and it might even be true that the
income tax should be lowered on everyone, provided we find a better
source of revenue to pay our bills. But I can't imagine that anyone
seriously believes that the current level of wealth inequality in the
United States is good and worth maintaining, or that our government's
first priority should be to spare a privileged person like myself the
slightest hardship as this once great nation falls into ruin.

And the ruination of the United States really does seem possible. It
has been widely reported, for instance, that students in Shanghai far surpass our own in science, reading, and math. In fact, when compared to other countries, American students are now disconcertingly average
(slightly below in math), where the average includes utopias like
Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Albania, Kazakhstan, and Indonesia. President
Obama was right to recognize this as a "Sputnik moment." But it is worse
than that. This story was immediately followed by a report about giddy
Creationists in the state of Kentucky being offered $40 million in tax
subsidies to produce a full-scale model of Noah's ark.
More horrible still, this ludicrous use of public money is probably a
wise investment, given that such a monument to scientific ignorance will
be guaranteed to attract an ovine influx of Christian tourists from
neighboring states. Seeing facts of this kind, juxtaposed without irony
or remedy at this dire moment in history, it is hard not to feel that
one is witnessing America's irreversible decline. Needless to say, most
Americans have no choice but to send their children to terrible
schools--where they will learn the lesser part of nothing and emerge
already beggared by a national debt now on course to reach $20 trillion.
And yet Republicans in every state can successfully campaign on a
promise to spend less on luxuries like education, while delivering tax
cuts to people who, if asked to guess their own net worth, could not
come within $10 million of the correct figure if their lives depended on
it.

American opposition to the "redistribution of wealth" has achieved
the luster of a religious creed. And, as with all religions, one finds
the faithful witlessly espousing doctrines that harm almost everyone,
including their own children. For instance, while most Americans have no
chance of earning or inheriting significant wealth, 68 percent want the
estate tax eliminated (and 31 percent consider it to be the "worst" and "least fair"
tax levied by the federal government). Most believe that limiting this
tax, which affects only 0.2 percent of the population, should be the top priority of the current Congress.

The truth, however, is that everyone must favor the "redistribution
of wealth" at some point. This relates directly to the issue of
education: as the necessity of doing boring and dangerous work
disappears--whether because we have built better machines and
infrastructure, or shipped our least desirable jobs overseas--people
need to be better educated so that they can apply themselves to more
interesting work. Who will pay for this? There is only one group of
people who can pay for anything at this point: the wealthy.

To make matters more difficult, Americans have made a religious
fetish of something called "self-reliance." Most seem to think that
while a person may not be responsible for the opportunities he gets in
life, each is entirely responsible for what he makes of these
opportunities. This is, without question, a false view of the human
condition. Consider the biography of any "self-made" American, from
Benjamin Franklin on down, and you will find that his success was
entirely dependent on background conditions that he did not make, and of
which he was a mere beneficiary. There is not a person on earth who
chose his genome, or the country of his birth, or the political and
economic conditions that prevailed at moments crucial to his progress.
Consequently, no one is responsible for his intelligence, range of
talents, or ability to do productive work. If you have struggled to make
the most of what Nature gave you, you must still admit that Nature also
gave you the ability and inclination to struggle. How much credit do I
deserve for not having Down syndrome or any other disorder that would
make my current work impossible? None whatsoever. And yet devotees of
self-reliance rail against those who would receive entitlements of
various sorts--health care, education, etc.--while feeling
unselfconsciously entitled to their relative good fortune. Yes, we must
encourage people to work to the best of their abilities and discourage
free riders wherever we can--but it seems only decent at this moment to
admit how much luck is required to succeed at anything in this life.
Those who have been especially lucky--the smart, well-connected, and
rich--should count their blessings, and then share some of these
blessings with the rest of society.

The wealthiest Americans often live as though they and their children
had nothing to gain from investments in education, infrastructure,
clean-energy, and scientific research. For instance, the billionaire Steve Ballmer,
CEO of Microsoft, recently helped kill a proposition that would have
created an income tax for the richest 1 percent in Washington (one of
seven states that has no personal income tax). All of these funds would
have gone to improve his state's failing schools. What kind of society
does Ballmer want to live in--one that is teeming with poor, uneducated
people? Who does he expect to buy his products? Where will he find his
next batch of software engineers? Perhaps Ballmer is simply worried that
the government will spend his money badly--after all, we currently
spend more than almost every other country on education, with abysmal
results. Well, then he should say so--and rather than devote hundreds of
thousands of dollars to stoking anti-tax paranoia in his state, he
should direct some of his vast wealth toward improving education, like
his colleague Bill Gates has begun to do.

There are, in fact, some signs that a new age of heroic philanthropy
might be dawning. For instance, the two wealthiest men in America, Bill
Gates and Warren Buffett, recently invited
their fellow billionaires to pledge the majority of their wealth to the
public good. This is a wonderfully sane and long overdue initiative
about which it is unforgivable to be even slightly cynical. But it is
not sufficient. Most of this money will stay parked in trusts and
endowments for decades, and much of it will go toward projects that are
less than crucial to the future of our society. It seems to me, however,
that Gates and Buffett could easily expand and target this effort:
asking those who have pledged, along with the rest of the wealthiest
Americans, to immediately donate a percentage of their net worth to a
larger fund. This group of benefactors would include not only the
super-rich, but people of far more modest means. I do not have 1/1000
the wealth of Steve Ballmer, but I certainly count myself among the
people who should be asked to sacrifice for the future of this country.
The combined wealth of the men and women on the Forbes 400 list is $1.37
trillion. By some estimates, there are at least another 1,500
billionaires in the United States. Something tells me that anyone with a
billion dollars could safely part with 25 percent of his or her
wealth--without being forced to sell any boats, planes, vacation homes,
or art. As of 2009, there were 980,000 families with a net worth
exceeding $5 million (not including their primary residence). Would a
one-time donation of 5 percent really be too much to ask to rescue our
society from the maw of history?

Some readers will point out that I am free to donate to the treasury
even now. But such solitary sacrifice would be utterly ineffectual, and I
am no more eager than anyone else is to fill the pork barrels of
corrupt politicians. However, if Gates and Buffett created a mechanism
that bypassed the current dysfunction of government, earmarking the
money for unambiguously worthy projects, I suspect that there are
millions of people like myself who would not hesitate to invest in the
future of America.

Imagine that Gates and Buffett raised a trillion dollars this way:
what should we spend it on? The first thing to acknowledge is that
almost any use of this money would be better than just letting it sit.
Mindlessly repairing every bridge, tunnel, runway, harbor, reservoir,
and recreation area in the United States would be an improvement over
what are currently doing. However, here are the two areas of investment
that strike me as most promising:

Education: It is difficult to think of anything more
important than providing the best education possible for our children.
They will develop the next technologies, medical cures, and global
industries, while mitigating their unintended effects, or they will fail
to do these things and consign us all to oblivion. The future of this
country will be entirely shaped by boys and girls who are just now
learning to think. What are we teaching them? Are we equipping them to
create a world worth living in? It doesn't seem so. Our public school
system is an international disgrace. Even the most advantaged children
in the United States do not learn as much as children in other
countries do. Yes, the inefficiencies in our current system could be
remedied, and must be, and these savings can then be put to good
use--but there is no question that a true breakthrough in education will
require an immense investment of further resources. Here's an expensive
place to start: make college free for anyone who can't afford it.

Clean Energy: As Thomas Friedman
and many others have pointed out, our dependence on nonrenewable
sources of energy is not only bad for our economy and the environment,
it is obliges us to subsidize both sides of the clash of civilizations.
Much of the money we spend on oil is used to export the lunatic ideology
of conservative Islam--building mosques and madrassas by the tens of
thousands, recruiting jihadists, and funding terrorist atrocities. We
should have devoted ourselves to a clean-energy Manhattan Project thirty
years ago. Success on this front would still yield enormous wealth in
this country, while simultaneously bankrupting the Middle Eastern states
that only pretend to be our allies. Our failure to rise to this
challenge already counts as one of the greatest instances of masochistic
stupidity in human history. Why prolong it?

I am aware that a proposal of this kind is bound to seem quixotic.
But what's to stop the wealthiest Americans from sponsoring a 21st
Century Renaissance? What politician would object to our immediately
spending a trillion dollars on improvements in education and energy
security? Perhaps there are even better targets for this money. Let
Gates and Buffett convene a team of brilliant people to lay out the
priorities. But again, we should remember that they could scarcely fail
to improve our situation. Simply repaving our roads, the dilapidation of
which causes $54 billion in damage to our cars every year, would be
better than doing nothing.