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Twenty years before a wealth tax became a serious consideration in national politics, two legal scholars battled over whether the policy would be constitutional.
Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter. You can sign up here.
Before we get going, can we ask that you think about giving to your member station this year? Link here. Great, now that that's out of the way, can we talk about whether the charitable deduction on the federal income tax makes any sense at all?
Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter. You can sign up here.
Normally, peer review is a boring process held behind the closed doors of the ivory tower. But the debate over The Triumph Of Injustice, the new book by Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, has become like a proxy battle for the Democratic presidential primary.
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"I don't think that billionaires should exist," Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said last week. And he's now proposed a way to get rid of them: his version of a wealth tax on the .1% richest families in America.
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Feeling sluggish? Having trouble achieving and maintaining productivity growth? Does it feel like investment will never, ever go up? You may be experiencing secular stagnation.
Symptoms include persistently low interest rates and weak inflation. Also, mediocre economic growth, despite a diet of huge deficits and cheap credit.
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Silvio Gesell hated money. A German entrepreneur who moved to Argentina for business in the late 19th century, he witnessed a massive financial crash in 1890 that convinced him that money was behind the world's economic problems: poverty, inequality, unemployment, stagnation.
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In 1944, almost exactly 75 years ago, more than 700 representatives from 44 nations traveled to the Mount Washington Hotel, a secluded resort in the mountains of Bretton Woods, N.H. With World War II coming to an end, they arrived to hammer out a new financial system for the global economy.
