Rethinking Wealth, From Birthright Capital to Big Spender Taxes

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Bloomberg Businessweek’s special Money Issue is a survey of how global wealth is distributed, spent, fought over, and invested. But the borderlines of wealth aren’t fixed—here are a few proposals from people who’d like to redraw them.

Baby Bonds

There’s a large racial wealth gap in the U.S.: Federal Reserve data show that the median white family has $171,000 in wealth. That’s about $150,000 more than the $17,600 of the median black family. These numbers include home equity.

One way to address this gap would be through “baby bonds”—a program to establish a universal birthright to capital. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has proposed a version in which the government would furnish every newborn with a $1,000 federally managed, interest-bearing trust account reserved until adulthood. Over time the government would add money to the account based on family income, with more going to those in lower-earning families. Children born into the poorest families could have almost $50,000 by age 18. Given the wealth position of black Americans relative to white ones, baby bonds could substantially close the median racial wealth gap among young adults in one generation.

The wealth gap as measured by the mean is an even wider chasm, with the average white family almost $800,000 richer than the average black one. That level of wealth is far from representative of the typical white family, but rather is driven by an obscene concentration of assets among a small class of white billionaires. So we may need other remedies, such as a wealth tax to address this concentration among the ultrarich, and a reparations program to redress the government-complicit theft, fraud, and terror that confiscated black wealth in our nation’s past. But baby bonds ensuring that everyone has the ability to build wealth are both race-conscious and universal.
—Darrick Hamilton is a professor of policy, economics, and sociology and executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. Naomi Zewde is a postdoctoral research scientist at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work.

Tax Big Spenders

U.S. wealth inequality is astounding. Surely, wealth should be taxed. Or should it be? Consider Warren Buffett. His house is modest, and he’s not into big boats; when he dies, he plans to give the bulk of his money to charity.

Instead, we should tax what the rich spend, including the value they consume from durable goods—their mansions, private jets, and yachts. I’d tax consumption above $100,000 per year starting at a 5% rate, rising to 30% at $1 million or more annually.

Compared with some other tax approaches, this plan is easy. There’s no need to account for every diamond ring or a magnum of Moët. Rather, levy what’s called a progressive cash-flow consumption tax. Consumption is calculated as all income—i.e., cash flow—a household takes in during the year, minus all the money the household invests. (To capture the consumption value that comes from durables such as houses, you’d have to figure out what it would cost the owner to rent instead.) In economics, investment equals saving, so the difference between income and investment tells you how much of a person’s wealth is spent.

Electronic records make it easy to track cash flow. And with stiff penalties put in place, we can require the rich to report their consumption abroad.
—Laurence Kotlikoff is an economics professor at Boston University.

Index Socialism

Americans have about $100 trillion of wealth. If that was divided evenly across the population, each individual would have a net worth of $300,000. At a 5% rate of return, this money would deliver to every person $15,000 annually in investment income. Poverty would be eliminated, inequality would be slashed, and the power of concentrated wealth would be neutralized.

If this sounds like a socialist fantasy, it is: Some 20th-century Marxist economists argued that it should be possible to bring a country’s assets into collective ownership and pay everyone a universal dividend. But part of that socialist idea—that millions of people could own a country’s capital together—has, in a way, already happened. Look at the rise of index funds, such as those run by BlackRock Inc. and Vanguard Group Inc. These companies now manage trillions of dollars for tens of millions of clients and are major investors in many public companies.

The bulk of these assets are held by the wealthy, but it’s not hard to see how a socialist society could build on this design. A huge, government-operated mutual fund—in which each citizen owned an equal, nontransferable share—could work just as well as index funds do today. The government could create an investment fund, use wealth taxes to gradually fill it up with return-generating assets, and then pay out an annual dividend to every American based on the fund’s return. Alaska’s Permanent Fund, which pays a dividend to state residents, and Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global have proved that such portfolios can work not just in theory, but also in practice.
—Matt Bruenig is president of People’s Policy Project, a think tank.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Pat Regnier at pregnier3@bloomberg.net, Bret Begun

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