There’s that moment that comes when the water molecules drifting around in the air constellate on a tiny speck of dust and become a rain drop and begin their dive to Earth, and you can latch onto that, just get smacked by a downward droplet and join those happy people, your oxygen mates singing hi to the oxygen atoms in their hydrogen-twin marriages, trios are the best, everyone partying for the time of the dive. You lose the sense of gravity pulling on you when you fall at terminal velocity for your droplet, in fact sometimes you get hung up in a cloud or a mist or a fog and it’s just delightful, a delicious no-g sensation, I would suppose that it might be like what you would call orgasm. Bonding, sure, that can be good or bad, but floating in the sky in an orgasmic cloud, wow.
But eventually the droplets are likely to coalesce until you are pelting down again. Snow is fun, sleet even more so. And then you crash onto Earth and things start again. Who would I join this time?
Well, shit— not this time! Turns out that people in Canada had begun to deal with asbestos mine tailings by feeding the toxic rubble into the tailing pools that form in and next to mine pits, then adding some local cyanobacteria. These cyanobacteria grabbed me and then bonded with the asbestos dust, and together we clumped into hydromagnesite, a form of magnesium carbonate. These local kidnappers were all happy to have locked me and many of my mates down again, and the asbestos too, but when you’ve floated in fog, and body-surfed through an alimentary tract, sitting there in a rock is boring as hell. My only hope is that I’ll get ground up and used as a rock-climber’s hand powder, that’s about all magnesium carbonate is good for. Maybe I’ll end up in the powder pouch of some awesome cliff climber, that would be exciting, but for now I’m stuck. Oh well, time for a nap.
67
Taxes are interesting. They are one way governments guide a society and fund governmental activities, more the former than the latter. They are as old as civilization. An ancient manifestation of the power of the state. It’s possible that both debt and money were invented in the earliest cities, specifically in order to enable and regularize taxation. Both of them being forms of IOU.
Progressive taxation refers to the idea that the more citizens own, the higher their rate of taxation. A regressive tax takes more, proportionally to individual wealth, from the poorest.
Income taxes tax individual or corporate annual income, so these incomes are often manipulated by those earning them to appear lower than they really are. Various deferments and reinvestments and other methods slip money through tax loopholes, and tax havens are places where money, if it can be moved there before the annual accounting takes place, will not be taxed by the haven’s host, or will be taxed much less. So a progressive income tax can become quite ineffective as such. Vigilance in application is required.
At certain moments in history excess personal wealth was frowned on, and the scale of progressive taxation grew quite steep. In the early 1950s, a time when many people felt that wealthy individuals had helped to cause and then profit from World War Two, the top tax bracket in the United States had earners paying in income tax 91 percent of all earnings over $400,000 (current value, four million dollars). This rate was approved by a Republican Congress and a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a man who had commanded the Allied forces in the war, and had seen the death and destruction first hand, including the concentration camps. Later these top rates were lowered, over and over, until in the neoliberal period top rates were more like 20 or 30 percent. In those decades the tax loopholes and dodges and deferments and havens also grew hugely, so these already low percentages are actually inflated compared to the real amounts collected. Income taxes thus were made much less progressive; this was a feature of the neoliberal period, part of the larger campaign favoring private over public, rich over poor.
Capital asset taxes, sometimes called Piketty taxes, tax the assessed value of whomever or whatever is being taxed. Usually these have been applied to corporations, but the same kind of tax can be applied to individuals. France taxed its corporations one percent of their assessed value per year, and if applied globally, the effects of such a tax could be very significant. These asset taxes too could be made progressive, such that the larger the corporation, or the assessed value of any asset, such as property, the higher the annual tax taken from it. If set steeply enough, a progressive tax of this sort would quickly cause big corporations to break up into smaller companies, to decrease their tax rate.
Land taxes, sometimes called Georgist taxes, after an economist named Henry George, are taxes on property, meaning in this case specifically land itself as an asset. Again, these land taxes could be set progressively such that larger properties, or more valuable properties by way of location, or land not lived on by its owner, got taxed at a higher rate. As a great deal of profit and liquid assets more generally get turned into real estate as soon as possible, usually to own something tangible, the value of which is likely to rise over time, or at least not disappear entirely in a bubble’s burst, a land tax properly designed could again swiftly redistribute land ownership more widely, while quickly swelling government coffers in order to pay for public work, thus reducing economic inequality.
A tax on burning fossil carbon, which could be