Tag Archives: taxes

This Man Can Help You Escape the IRS Forever

by KatrinDesir Posted on April 17, 2017

Mother Jones

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In January, New Zealanders were surprised to discover that Peter Thiel, the billionaire PayPal co-founder and Donald Trump adviser whose libertarian proclivities and social quirks were lampooned on HBO’s Silicon Valley, had quietly become one of them during a 2011 ceremony in Santa Monica, California. Thiel, who owns real estate in New Zealand, secured an exception from the country’s residency requirement by emphasizing his business and philanthropic clout, his investments in two Kiwi companies (totaling $7 million), and his donation of nearly $1 million to a local earthquake relief fund. “We do not sell our citizenship; it is earned,” New Zealand’s Ministry of Internal Affairs claimed after the news broke. Subsequent reports speculated that Thiel, besides being a huge Lord of the Rings fan, viewed the country as a survivalist haven in the event of an apocalypse. “I have found no other country that aligns more with my view of the future” is all Thiel would say.

Thiel’s little secret came as no surprise to David Lesperance. The Canadian-born lawyer is among the world’s leading champions of transnational exit plans for the superwealthy. Business is booming. Lesperance says he has expatriated more than 300 ultrarich Americans to date—he calls them “golden geese”—and has set up contingency plans for countless others. Thiel is not a client, but Lesperance says several household-name techies are. Mad Max scenarios aside, their goal is tax avoidance. If that means giving up an American passport, so be it.

Lesperance says his golden-geese range in net worth from about $25 million all the way up to (he Googles it) $19 billion. He won’t discuss his clients by name, but they fall into three categories: The first includes company founders and CEOs concerned with succession planning, strategic philanthropy, and the preservation of wealth across generations. Next are people “who sing a song or act or kick or hit a ball”—including several European soccer pros—who earn very high incomes for an “unknown yet finite” period of time. And then there are the “masters of the universe”—the hedge funders, private-equity guys, and venture capitalists.

The latter are beneficiaries of the carried-interest loophole, an accounting trick that treats their compensation as capital gains, which are taxed at a far lower rate than regular income. Both Trump and Hillary Clinton repeatedly promised to close this loophole, and while the president’s Goldman Sachs-packed Cabinet suggests that carried interest isn’t going anywhere, hedgers gonna hedge. “It is really the uncertainty about the future that is driving people like Peter Thiel,” Lesperance says.

A handful of relatively stable nations court wealthy foreigners with sweet tax deals if they become citizens. Poland is a good prospect, Lesperance says. Ditto Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, and Portugal—where “they will not tax you on income and capital gains for 10 years.” Ireland has attracted seven members of the Getty clan, as well as Campbell’s soup heir Jack Dorrance III and Robert Dart, whose family empire produces McDonald’s packaging. (The United States doesn’t offer these kinds of tax breaks to would-be Americans, but its EB-5 visa program gives green cards to immigrants who make a $1 million business investment. American real estate developers—including Trump—have used EB-5 visas to capitalize their projects.)

Lesperance also points out that America is the only nation besides Eritrea that taxes people based on citizenship, not residency. This means an expat living and earning income in, say, England, is taxed on those earnings by both countries. The London-based filmmaker and Monty Python alum Terry Gilliam ditched his US citizenship years ago for precisely this reason. “I got tired of paying taxes in a country I don’t live in,” he told me. “Then I discovered that when I died, my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay for the taxes in America.”

But big names who bail on America can face blowback. In 2012, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin set off a firestorm after he relinquished his US citizenship and relocated to Singapore in advance of the social network going public. Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer and Bob Casey quickly introduced the Ex-Patriot Act to punish erstwhile Americans such as “Mr. Saverin” who, as Schumer put it in a speech on the Senate floor, have “chosen to disown the United States to save some money.” Had it passed, the bill would have permanently barred such former citizens from reentering the country, even as tourists, and levied a capital gains tax of 30 percent on their sales of US assets, retroactive for 10 years.

In Flight of the Golden Geese, a 2015 book Lesperance co-authored with the British economist Ian Angell, he forcefully argues that overtaxing the 1 percent is counterproductive. Sure, the ultrarich may pay lower rates than Warren Buffett’s secretary, but they still account for nearly half of federal income tax revenue. Every time Uncle Sam loses a goose, he warns, federal coffers take a disproportionate hit. Enacting new millionaires taxes, he claims, “will not generate more tax dollars, but will rather most likely have the completely opposite effect.”

Lesperance was raised in Windsor, Ontario, within spitting distance of Detroit. His father, an engineer for General Motors, built an early computer system to track car parts flowing back and forth, so “I grew up at the breakfast table with cross-border issues.” During his college years, his dad helped him land a summer gig with Canadian customs, interrogating drivers headed in from the United States. Lesperance later paid his way through law school at the University of Saskatchewan by stamping passports at the Toronto airport.

He got into the golden-goose game as a newly minted lawyer in 1990, when he was approached by a Detroit attorney who wanted to quit the United States for tax reasons. The client had already stowed part of his $15 million net worth in an “offshore bucket” and purchased citizenship in St. Kitts and Nevis. Lesperance helped him relinquish his US passport and set up permanent residency in Canada. For three years, the client commuted daily from Windsor to Detroit to wrap up his business while still fulfilling Canada’s residency requirement. He then declared himself a nonresident citizen of Canada and moved to Australia, where a retiree incentive program permanently exempted his offshore trust from taxation. “I thought it was very cool and very cute,” Lesperance says.

He also thought it was a one-off. But referrals began trickling in, aided by a mid-1990s Forbes article naming two of his clients who had fled the taxman. Overall, expatriations of wealthy Americans averaged well under 1,000 a year until 2010, when the number abruptly doubled thanks to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the enactment of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, which made it difficult for Americans living abroad to conceal their foreign earnings from the IRS. These golden-goose expatriations hit 5,411 last year—a record high. Now Lesperance spends most of his time arranging new citizenships. One client, he told me, has collected nine passports—for the bragging rights, mainly: “It had gone far beyond prudence.”

It was probably inevitable that the lawyer would one day act upon his own counsel. When we first spoke, in 2015, Lesperance had arranged a backup citizenship for himself, but he wouldn’t say where. That goose has now flown. You can find him in sunny Portugal.

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This Man Can Help You Escape the IRS Forever

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How Do Partisans React to the Election of One of Their Own?

by ElviaY85qvu Posted on April 15, 2017

Mother Jones

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Via Gallup, here’s another hot-off-the-presses example of different partisan responses to similar situations:

Republican views of the taxes they pay improved substantially when Bush and Trump were elected—even before any actual changes were made to the tax code—while Democrats had essentially no reaction when Obama was elected. Likewise, Republican views declined sharply when Obama was elected, but Democratic views didn’t decline when Bush and Trump were elected.

Now, this is not a great example. Republicans take taxes more seriously than Democrats, and they expect that Republican presidents will cut taxes. The fact that their view of tax fairness changes even before anything happens may simply reflect their justified confidence that their taxes will indeed go down under a Republican administration.

If, instead, the question were, “What’s your view of racial justice in America?” it’s possible that Democrats would react strongly to the election of a Republican, while Republicans wouldn’t care much. Does anybody know of any actual examples like this?

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How Do Partisans React to the Election of One of Their Own?

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The Economy Is Not Booming

by UPNKatia977560 Posted on March 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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Neil Irwin writes about the fabulous Trump economy:

The stock market reached yet another new high on Wednesday, the latest development to make a mockery of what savvy economic commentators thought they knew about the world.

Consider how things looked one year ago. The world economy seemed hopelessly trapped in a cycle of low growth and inflation. Markets recoiled at the mere possibility that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates. Populist political insurgencies seemed to threaten yet more financial market chaos.

Now, interest rates and inflation forecasts have risen substantially from last winter’s lows; financial markets are shrugging off — or even rallying at the possibility of — imminent Fed rate increases; and it is all taking place during Donald J. Trump’s presidency.

Why do we keep hearing this? Once again, here’s the S&P 500 since the end of the Great Recession. I’ve even adjusted it for inflation just to be super fair:

There nothing there. The stock market is growing at precisely the same rate as it has for the past eight years. If you zoom in and take look at the S&P 500 just since Election Day, you see the same thing: it’s been bouncing tightly around a trend line the entire time. There has been no rally at the possibility of interest rate increases from the Fed.

As for inflation, I’ve already dealt with that today. It’s been closely following a trendline too, and literally nothing new has happened since the election. However, it is true that inflationary expectations started rising last June—though a little context helps here:

If you start your chart in mid-2016, you can make it look like inflationary expectations are taking off like a rocket. But in reality, we’re still nowhere close to where we were five years after the end of the Great Recession, and expectations have flattened out in the past couple of months.

Finally, economic growth. You can talk about animal spirits all you want, but GDP growth in the US has been running steadily between 1 percent and 3 percent since 2010. Last quarter it was 1.9 percent, and there’s no particular reason to think it’s about to take a sustained jump. As for the rest of the world, the IMF doesn’t seem especially optimistic:

US growth might be a little sluggish, but it’s still a lot better than China and Europe, which are projected to decline in 2017 and 2018. The rest of the world will do a little better, but only a little.

However, there is one part of the economy that has unquestionably been booming since Trump was elected: big Wall Street banks.

Wall Street has been kicking major ass since November 8. And why not? The economy may or may not be booming, but they’re pretty sure that Trump is going to lower their taxes and ease up on all those pesky regulations that Obama tried to force on them. If I were a big bank, I’d be pretty excited too.

I’m not especially trying to badmouth the economy here. It’s doing fine, if not great. Growth is decent, wages are showing signs of life, we’re getting close to full employment, and inflation is under control. As labor markets tighten, we might even some real improvement in wages and living standards. That’s not bad, especially compared to the rest of the world. But there’s really not much evidence that we’ve been in any kind of boom times since November. Growth is steady, the stock market is steady, employment is steady, and inflation is steady. Just because Wall Street is excited doesn’t mean they know something we don’t.

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The Economy Is Not Booming

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Here Are Our Top 20 Imports From Mexico

by IleneHinds Posted on January 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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How much would a 20 percent tariff on Mexican imports cost us? I think it’s pointless to delve very deeply into this until President Trump and congressional Republicans produce a serious plan of some kind. Relying on random tweets and leaks from GOP gatherings will just drive us all crazy, as we try to analyze every dumb idea that gets run up the flagpole. Hell, even Paul Krugman says he’s a little confused about some of this stuff, and his Nobel Prize was for international trade.

However, there is one bit of raw data that you might as well get familiar with, since it’s not going to change. Here are our top 20 imports from Mexico:

I’ve highlighted a few of the categories that get the most attention: cars, televisions, crude oil, and produce. Generally speaking, if we tax these things at X percent, their price in the US is going to increase X percent. It won’t be quite that much, since trade will adjust based on the taxes, and in the long run the dollar will rise. Probably. And this all assumes there’s no retaliation from Mexico, which there probably would be.

Still, in the short and medium term, a 20 percent tax will increase the price of Mexican goods by 20 percent. That means a Ford Focus will cost 20 percent more, flat-screen televisions will cost 20 percent more, and avocados will cost 20 percent more. The problem, of course, is that Ford can’t increase the price of a Focus by 20 percent. Nobody would buy them. So they’ll just have to keep prices low and take it in the shorts.

Bottom line: in some cases, prices will go up, which will be bad for US consumers. In other cases, importers who are stuck with Mexican factories will have to accept lower profits, which is bad for US companies. In yet other cases, imports will just cease and plants will be shut down, which will be bad for Mexico.

So who will this be good for? That’s a very good question. In the case of cars and TVs, probably Japan and South Korea. In the case of produce, maybe Chile. In the case of crude oil, maybe Iran.

Of course, if we decide to put a tax on all imports from everywhere—not just Mexico—then consumer prices of just about everything will go up with no release valve. This would violate every trade treaty we’re part of, which means that the entire world would probably retaliate. In the end, prices would go up and American factories would either keep production unchanged or even cut back some. This would be pretty disastrous for the working class folks who voted for Trump.

But that’s what everyone is talking about.

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Here Are Our Top 20 Imports From Mexico

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Obamacare Is One of the Best Social Welfare Programs Ever Passed

by JamisonJose503 Posted on January 6, 2017

Mother Jones

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Jeff Stein reports on Democratic plans to fight any attempt to repeal Obamacare:

“We are united in our opposition to these Republican attempts to Make America Sick Again,” Schumer said, cracking a slight smile at the inversion of Donald Trump’s campaign slogan. The line suggests that Schumer wants to reframe the fight over Obamacare into one about the broader GOP health care agenda, which includes proposals to change Medicaid andMedicare.

Since the health care law passed in 2009, Schumer and other Democrats in Congress have learned that defending it can be a political loser. Republicans stayed unified in their opposition, and public opinion stayed on their side. But in their final push to save it, Democrats are moving the battle to new turf, fighting over Americans’ shared frustration with the inadequacies of the country’s health care system, not the law itself.

This is sadly true. Democrats have never been willing to defend Obamacare, and they still aren’t. It’s crazy. Obamacare isn’t perfect. Nothing this side of the pearly gates is. But if politicians limited themselves to defending programs with no problems, we’d never hear from them again.1

But considering where we started—with a Rube Goldberg medical system dominated by well-heeled special interests and all but indifferent to the near-poor—Obamacare is almost miraculously close to perfect. I know that Republicans have convinced everyone otherwise, but take a look at the results of this Kaiser tracking poll from November. Virtually every single aspect of Obamacare is not just popular, but very popular:

Even Republicans like practically everything about Obamacare, including the taxes to pay for it. People like the subsidies; they like the exchanges; they like the out-of-pocket caps; they like the Medicaid expansion; they like the pre-existing conditions ban; and they like taxing the rich to fund it all. The only unpopular part of the whole law is the individual mandate.

What’s more, Obamacare has been a huge success. It’s provided health coverage to 20 million people. It’s massively reduced the cost of health coverage for low-income families. It’s slashed the number of uninsured by half among blacks and whites and by a quarter among Hispanics. It’s allowed people with expensive chronic illnesses to get treatment. It will help keep overall health costs down in the future. It’s had no negative impact on the employer health care system. And it’s done all this without raising the deficit. In fact, it’s cut the deficit.

And yet, Democrats are still afraid to defend it loudly and proudly. This just boggles me. Sure, Obamacare has some problems. Certain regions don’t have enough competition. Deductibles are high if you buy a bronze plan. And a small part of the population has been hit with large premium increases.

But this is something like 10 percent of Obamacare. The other 90 percent is purely positive. Why are so many liberals unwilling to say so? Why aren’t they willing to defend Obamacare with the same fervor they defend other imperfect programs, like Medicare or the ADA or the Clean Air Act or Social Security? Obamacare is at least as good as any of them. But no one will ever believe it if Republicans are attacking it relentlessly while Democrats mutter resentfully that there’s no public option and politicians hide in their offices in the hope that nobody will blame them if their premiums have gone up.

If Democrats aren’t willing to defend Obamacare, it’s hardly a surprise that Republicans feel free to go after it without consequence. Maybe they should start.

1Yes, I know, that might not be a bad thing.

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Obamacare Is One of the Best Social Welfare Programs Ever Passed

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Harry Reid Exposes the Left’s Dirty Little Secret

by GabrielPorterfie Posted on December 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jason Zengerle profiles Sen. Harry Reid:

“As my staff will tell you,” Reid said to me when we spoke the next day, “I’ve done a number of things because no one else will do it. I’ve done stuff no one else will do.” I expected him to give an ­example of a successful parliamentary maneuver or perhaps a brave political endorsement, but instead he mentioned one of the most disreputable episodes of his long career, when, during the 2012 presidential campaign, he falsely accused Mitt Romney of not having paid his taxes. (Even though the facts were wrong, the accusation spurred Romney to release his tax returns, which showed he had only paid 14.1 percent.) “I tried to get everybody to do that. I didn’t want to do that,” Reid said. “I didn’t have anything against him personally. He’s a fellow Mormon, nice guy. I went to everybody. But no one would do it. So I did it.”

Brendan Nyhan comments:

Nyhan is right, but my initial reaction to this anecdote was quite different: Reid tried and tried to get someone else to do this, but no one would.

Can you imagine a similar situation on the right? Sean Hannity would have practically paid for the privilege. Rush Limbaugh would have happily spent an entire show on it. The Wall Street Journal edit page would have been all over it. Newt Gingrich would have pitched in. At least 20 or 30 members of the House would have been happy to do it. I bet Jim Inhofe would have given a speech in the well of the Senate in a heartbeat. Half a dozen Super PACs would have rushed to buy air time.

But among liberals, zilch. No one would do something like this. That’s pretty amazing.

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Harry Reid Exposes the Left’s Dirty Little Secret

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Weekend Catch-Up: How Did Donald Trump Lose $916 Million?

by DaleneX56466 Posted on October 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Surprisingly, I had some real-life stuff to attend to this weekend, which means I’ve only just caught up on the latest Trump meltdown. I might as well share it with you, since maybe a few other people need to catch up too.

On Saturday, the New York Times published copies of the first page of Donald Trump’s 1995 state tax returns from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. They show that Trump declared a net operating loss that year of $916 million—about $1.5 billion in today’s dollars. Questions abounded:

Where did the tax returns come from? They were sent to the Times anonymously, so no one knows. But rumors swirled around Marla Maples, Trump’s second wife, who might have gotten them as part of her divorce proceedings in 1999.
Did Trump really lose that much money in a single year? It seems all but impossible. Among millionaires who declared losses in 1995, the average amount was $614 thousand.
It seems likely, then, that Trump’s gargantuan loss was basically an accounting fiction of some kind. John Hempton, an Australian hedge fund manager and former expert on tax avoidance for the Australian Treasury, has a theory that Trump may have “parked” the debt from his bankruptcies with a dummy party offshore, where it was never collected but never officially forgiven. This would allow him to declare $916 million in losses even though he never truly lost anything.
What was the point of all this? Most likely, the Times speculates, it was used as a tax loss carry forward, which allowed Trump to declare zero income—and thus pay zero taxes—for as long as 18 years.

So how did Team Trump respond to this? Notably, nobody denied anything. Rudy Giuliani declared that Trump was an “absolute genius.” Chris Christie also applauded Trump’s genius, and remarked improbably that this was a “very good story” for Trump. Trump himself said nothing except that he had paid lots of other kinds of taxes, and that yes, he is a genius:

Needless to say, Trump knows nothing about tax law at all. He has accountants and tax advisors who do all this stuff for him. Nonetheless, the main message from Trumpville is that Donald Trump is a genius.

Elsewhere, reaction was a wee bit more restrained. It turns out that lots of people think that billionaires probably ought to pay income tax. All of us little people have to, after all.

So what’s next? Well, when the New York Times was asked if they have any more of Trump’s tax returns, they answered “No comment.” That might mean there’s more to come. Next Sunday’s debate should be fun, shouldn’t it?

POSTSCRIPT: Team Trump is trying to bury this story by directing all their attention to Bill Clinton’s sexual escapades; suggesting that maybe Hillary has cheated on Bill; and blathering about Hillary being mean to the women who accused Bill of misdeeds in the 90s. It’s not working. Nobody really cares much about this stuff anymore, and even the small interest that remains was wiped out by the tax story.

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Weekend Catch-Up: How Did Donald Trump Lose $916 Million?

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Trump’s Tax Plan Reveals His Contempt for the Middle Class

by PQLZelma9382393 Posted on September 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago, NYU law professor Lily Batchelder released a paper that takes a close look at the details of Donald Trump’s tax plan. She concludes that several million middle-class families will pay more under Trump’s plan than they do now. Jim Tankersley reports the Trump campaign’s response:

The Trump campaign called the findings “pure fiction,” contending the analysis neglects a crucial benefit for low-income taxpayers….Most importantly, Miller said Trump will instruct the committees writing his plan into law to make sure that it does not raise taxes on any low- or middle-income earners. “In sending our proposal to the tax-writing committees we will include instructions to ensure all low and middle income households are protected,” Miller said.

This is obviously spin, but the funny thing is that it’s true. The details that Batchelder analyzed really won’t matter much once Trump’s proposal gets fed into the congressional sausage machine. Rather, his tax plan is essentially a statement of values. It tells the voting public what he believes in.

And that’s the problem. If Trump truly cared about the middle class, he and his team would have taken a very close look at the details to make sure his plan benefited the entire middle class. Obviously they didn’t. They treated it like a throwaway that Congress would iron out later.

Conversely, does anyone doubt that they were very careful indeed about vetting the effect of his plan on the rich? There’s surely not a single person in the top 1 percent who will accidentally end up paying higher taxes under Trump’s plan. Why? Because Trump cares about rich people. They’re winners.1 Struggling families and single mothers are losers. Why sweat the details for the likes of them?

1Also because his plan is so overwhelmingly favorable for rich people that it’s basically impossible for small details to wipe out their average gain.

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Trump’s Tax Plan Reveals His Contempt for the Middle Class

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High-Risk Pools Don’t Work, Have Never Worked, and Won’t Work in the Future

by GaryULNmsilfnrv Posted on April 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Even among conservative voters, Obamacare’s protection of people with pre-existing conditions has always been popular. In a recent Kaiser poll, it garnered 74 percent approval from Democrats, 70 percent approval from independents, and 69 percent approval from Republicans.

Technically, this protection is guaranteed by two different provisions of Obamacare: guaranteed issue, which means that insurance companies have to accept anyone who applies for coverage, and community rating, which means they have to charge everyone the same price. But popular or not, Paul Ryan wants nothing to do with it:

In election-year remarks that could shed light on an expected Republican healthcare alternative, Ryan said existing federal policy that prevents insurers from charging sick people higher rates for health coverage has raised costs for healthy consumers while undermining choice and competition.

….”Less than 10 percent of people under 65 are what we call people with pre-existing conditions, who are really kind of uninsurable,” Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, told a student audience at Georgetown University. “Let’s fund risk pools at the state level to subsidize their coverage, so that they can get affordable coverage,” he said. “You dramatically lower the price for everybody else. You make health insurance so much more affordable, so much more competitive and open up competition.”

It’s true that the cost of covering sick people raises the price of insurance for healthy people. That’s how insurance works. But there’s no magic here. It costs the same to treat sick people whether you do it through Obamacare or through a high-risk pool—and it doesn’t matter whether you fund it via taxes for Obamacare or taxes for something else. However, there are some differences:

Handling everyone through a single system is more efficient and more convenient.
High-risk pools have a lousy history. They just don’t work.
Implementing them at the state level guarantees a race to the bottom, since no state wants to attract lots of sick people into its program.
Ryan’s promise to fund high-risk pools is empty. He will never support the taxes it would take to do it properly, and he knows it.

This is just more hand waving. Everyone with even a passing knowledge of the health care business knows that high-risk pools are a disaster, but Republicans like Ryan keep pitching them anyway as some kind of bold, new, free-market alternative to Obamacare. They aren’t. They’ve been around forever and everyone knows they don’t work.

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High-Risk Pools Don’t Work, Have Never Worked, and Won’t Work in the Future

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Do Lucky People Feel Better About Paying Taxes?

by LupeGovanvcuuf Posted on April 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Robert Frank thinks that we can get rich people to support higher taxes by reminding them of how lucky they are:

Underestimating the importance of luck is [] a totally understandable tendency….Most highly successful people are very talented and hardworking, after all, and when they construct the narratives of their own lives, the most readily available memories are the difficult problems they’ve been solving every day for decades. Less salient are the sporadic external events that also invariably matter, like the mentor who helped you during a rough patch in 11th grade or the promotion you got because a more qualified colleague had to turn it down to care for an ill spouse.

….I’ve seen even brief discussions of the link between success and luck temper the outrage many wealthy people feel about taxes….In my own recent conversations with highly successful people, I’ve seen opinions change on the spot. Many who seem never to have considered the possibility that their success stemmed from factors other than their own talent and effort are often surprisingly willing to rethink. In many instances, even brief reflection stimulates them to recall specific examples of good breaks they’ve enjoyed along the way.

I’ve long wondered how it is that so many people are completely clueless about how lucky they are. Off the top of my head, here’s the story of my life:

I was born in the richest state in the richest country in the richest era of human history. I was born white, male, straight, and healthy. I was born with a high IQ and an even temper. My parents loved me and took care of me. We weren’t rich, but I never wanted for anything important. I attended good quality state schools free of charge for 17 years. I never had any catastrophic money problems after I left home. By a rather unlikely chance, I ended up marrying the most wonderful person in the world. I had a great mentor at one job who helped me make an improbable move into high-tech marketing. Later I found myself working for a guy I happened to click with, and ended up vice president of marketing. Our company eventually got acquired and I made a bunch of money. After I left, I just happened to start blogging as a hobby right at the time blogging became big. A couple of years later I got a call out of the blue asking if I wanted to blog for pay. A few years after that I got another call out of the blue and ended up at MoJo.

There’s more, but that’s enough for now. And of course, recently I’ve had some bad luck. But even that hasn’t been so bad. Thanks to all the good luck I had before, I’ve received hundreds of thousands of dollars of top-notch medical treatment at practically no cost.

Does any of this mean I didn’t work hard and diligently? Of course not. But lots of people work hard and diligently. In fact, most people do. If I had worked hard and diligently but been born in a small village in Pakistan, I’d be…living in a small village in Pakistan right now. All the hard work and diligence in the world wouldn’t have done much of anything for me.

I can easily believe that most people give short shrift to all this stuff. Hell, I’ve known people who were smug about their real estate acumen because they happened to buy a house in 2002, and then cried about their terrible luck when they failed to sell it in 2007. We all like to fool ourselves into believing that good things are due to our smarts while bad things are all down to bad luck. But for most of us, there’s an awful lot of good luck involved in our lives too.

But here’s the thing I’m interested in: is it really true that pointing this out to a rich person is likely to turn them into a tax-loving supporter of the welfare state? That hasn’t been my experience, but then, I’ve never gone whole hog on the luck argument. Maybe it works! But if it does, we liberals have sure been remarkably negligent for the past few decades. This is a pretty easy argument to make, after all.

So: has anyone (other than Robert Frank) tried this? Ideally with a rich person, but even an upper-middle-class Republican will do. Did it work? Inquiring minds want to know.

More here: 

Do Lucky People Feel Better About Paying Taxes?

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