. If “the world” is hidden structural violence, then “the devil” is sanctified, romanticized, and legitimated violence—violence that is deemed culturally necessary to control the angry flesh and the world run amuck. Any institution thought of as “too big to fail” or somehow above criticism has a strong possibility of diabolical misuse. Think of the military industrial complex, the penal system, banks, multinational corporations subject to no law, tax codes benefiting the wealthy, or even organized religion itself. We need and admire these institutions all too much. As a result, they can “get away with murder.” Paul called this level of violence “powers, principalities, thrones, and dominions” (Colossians 1:16).
.. If we do not recognize the roots of violence at the first and disguised structural level (“the world”), we will waste time focusing exclusively on the second and individual level (“the flesh”), and we will seldom see our real devils who are always disguised as angels of light (“the devil”).
When the Rich Said No to Getting Richer
George Romney — yes, Mitt’s father — turned down several big annual bonuses. He did so, he told his company’s board, because he believed that no executive should make more than $225,000 a year (which translates into almost $2 million today).
He worried that “the temptations of success” could distract people from more important matters
.. Romney didn’t try to make every dollar he could, or anywhere close to it. The same was true among many of his corporate peers. In the early 1960s, the typical chief executive at a large American company made only 20 times as much as the average worker
.. The old culture of restraint had multiple causes, but one of them was the tax code. When Romney was saying no to bonuses, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent. Even if he had accepted the bonuses, he would have kept only a sliver of them.
.. As the economist Gabriel Zucman says, “It’s not worth it to try to earn $50 million in income when 90 cents out of an extra dollar goes to the I.R.S.”
.. The tax rates helped create a culture in which Americans found gargantuan incomes to be bizarre.
A few years after Romney turned down his bonuses from the American Motors Corporation, Lyndon B. Johnson signed legislation that lowered the top marginal tax rate to 70 percent. Under Ronald Reagan, it dropped to 50 percent and kept falling. Since 1987, the top rate has hovered between 30 percent and 40 percent.
.. there is no evidence that a modestly higher rate would hurt the economy. The recent president with the strongest economic record, Bill Clinton, increased the rate, while the one with the weakest economic record, George W. Bush, cut it.
Trump has a plan to change the tax code to make himself much, much richer
The plan creates a massive loophole with which ordinary people can evade taxes. Instead of just working for Vox.com, I could form DylanCorp LLC, contract with Vox to provide writing services, and pay a 15 percent rate on DylanCorp’s earnings rather than my current 25 percent rate. For rich people paying a top rate of 39.6 percent (or the top individual rate of 33 percent that Trump proposed during the campaign)
.. A new study finds that when Kansas exempted pass-through income, the result wasn’t more investment or growth but a surge in this kind of tax avoidance.
.. the Trump Organization, and the entire Trump family. The Trump Organization isn’t a “C corporation.” It doesn’t pay corporate income tax. Instead, it’s structured as a collection of pass-through enterprises, so the vast majority of income accruing to Trump and his family is taxed through this system. Trump almost certainly pays the 39.6 percent rate on his earnings, so he’s cutting his own top tax rate by more than half. It’s the most transparently self-interested policy he’s proposed since taking office, and it will likely save him tens of millions of dollars.
.. That return also implied that without the alternative minimum tax, which Trump wants to repeal, he would have paid less than 3.5 percent of his income in federal income taxes. Cutting the pass-through rate while repealing the AMT would probably reduce his tax burden to roughly half that level. Instead of paying $38 million, he could’ve paid less than $3 million.
.. A paper by Berkeley economist Stefano DellaVigna and co-authors found that Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s TV network, Mediaset, saw profits grow by at least €1 billion during his time as premier, not necessarily due to graft but because businesses shifted advertising to Mediaset as a way to lobby Berlusconi.
Trump’s Tax Push Begins
The best test for judging any Trump administration tax plan is the Mnuchin test — the standard that President Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, laid out a few months ago:
“Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions, so that there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class. There will be a big tax cut for the middle class, but any tax cuts we have for the upper class will be offset by less deductions that pay for it.”
I’ll repeat the key phrase for emphasis: “there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.”
Mnuchin was right to make this commitment. While middle-class incomes have stagnated, the top 0.01 percent of earners have had their average inflation-adjusted income roughly quadruple to $11.3 million since 1980. Their taxes have fallen, too. There’s no justification for cutting those taxes further.
Yet on Wednesday Trump, with Mnuchin as the pitch man, proposed precisely that, violating Mnuchin’s own standard.