I am generally in favor of the policies that Gabriel Zucman proposes. Today, he and Emmanuel Saez wrote a guest essay (see also archive.ph version) for The NY Times arguing in favor of California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax. I think this would be a good tax. Zucman helped to create taxjusticenow.org in 2019, which shows [ ]
This is a good draft year in the NBA, so many teams are tanking , or intentionally sitting players and otherwise manipulating their line-ups so as to lose and thereby (hopefully) get a good position in the draft lottery. A game in which one or both teams are tanking is often less enjoyable to watch and [ ]
The following feels insufficient, yet I want to make it explicit that I oppose Trump and his policies including the following: I guess everyone who reads this knows me directly; please give me your comments in person.
In a recent episode of Money Macro (Youtube, Overcast) Joeri Schasfoort interviewed Dennis Egger about a massive basic income experiment that Give Directly did in Africa. Joeri asked: people say I don t want to give a man fish. I want to teach him how to fish. But could you then say, no, you should [ ]
I enjoyed this interview from DW News with Philippe Aghion, winner of the 2025 Nobel in Economics. In the interview he advocates for a Danish-style social safety net as a mechanism that allow creative destruction: i.e. technological growth without leaving people behind. I made a transcript of the last four minutes, with some edits for [ ]
The US (and the world?) seems to be debating now whether we should have No Kings or no science . The former term is used in recent protests against Trumps styling himself as king in marked contrast to the resistance of George Washington to being monarch. No Science is my label for threatened or actual defunding [ ]
Ukraine is fighting a war of survival; how is it being paid for? We know that Ukraine is actively looking for funding from the West, but is it also funding the war with income tax increases? For context, what did the US do in past wars? Below I show that the US dramatically increased ordinary income tax rates on middle and (especially) high incomes during wars, while Ukraine has only recently made…
I just finished reading The Great Tax Wars by Steven R. Weisman. From the first income tax during the Civil War through WWI, this book describes the (familiar!) debate about how progressive the tax system should be, and even whether or not we should have an income tax. I found the themes and arguments in [ ]
I support Ukraine during the current war; though they are receiving significant foreign aid, revenue from income tax remains a big part of their national budget. This post reviews individual income tax in Ukraine for everyday people and for a class of entrepreneur. I show effective tax rates vs income for these two classes and [ ]
taxFoo.jl is a tool for inspecting US taxes prior to 1960.