I think there’s also another dimension to why you should want to make sure the richest people are paying taxes, and that is that people do what other people do. Yes. I was thinking about this while reading your book and preparing for this. I pay taxes, I don’t mind paying taxes. I think that is part of living in a society. Living in America has been good to me. It does piss me off that people above me are not paying taxes. And when I hear sometimes, I’m talking about their weird strategies, and I’m not talking about centibillionaires here, just people who spend more time on tax avoidance, – you think, “Oh, am I being a sucker?” -Yeah. And the fact that at these very high levels, the very richest are making the rich people right underneath them feel like suckers. People don’t want to be suckers. They don’t want to feel that other people are getting a deal they’re not getting. Now, on one hand, you might think it would be good if this made more rich people advocate for a better tax system, which it doesn’t seem to have done, to shut down the ability of people above them to do this. But I do think that it’s very corrosive —— – I totally agree. – to social solidarity. – I completely agree. – To have this sense that there are people out there getting a way better deal than you are. I couldn’t agree more. And that’s why I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that people feel like, this point that you made before, “Well, the regular people are always going to lose out. The rich are always going to have their way. It’s always going to be to their advantage.” But that is not always the case. And that’s why I think it’s important to think back in history to different times. So one of the times I think is particularly interesting is the Tax Reform Act of 1986. That is the last time that we actually have had any really meaningful reform in the tax system. It was under President Reagan, which was kind of surprising, but it adopted principles that had been around under both parties. And what it did, when we talk about high-income earners and the inability of high-income earners to avoid taxes, that is because of changes that occurred in 1986. Prior to 1986, we had a flourishing tax shelter business, and high-paid, your high-paid surgeon would have not paid taxes on their income because they would have been able to invest in tax shelters and offset all of their income —— People always talk about the very high mid-century, World War II, post-World War II income tax rates, but I think this is important because some of these were not actually as real by 1986 as they look on a chart. Exactly. So you had these high rates, but you had massive avoidance by high-income earners. And the 1986 act did something very interesting. And I think something that we should be doing today, which is it broadened the base by getting rid of those tax shelters. And so effectively got rid of those tax shelters that we don’t have them today. Our high-income people, people with lots of salaries, they are paying lots of taxes. There’s really very little reason or ways for them to avoid taxes. And they were a politically powerful group. So it can happen if you have people that really care about making it happen, it’s not like it’s impossible to make happen. And I think that is the only way to go. Our only way forward as a country is if we figure out how to have a fair tax system. And I think that imperative, that moral imperative, is also a financial imperative, because right now, our national debt is so great. Interest payments on the national debt are the third-highest expense after Social Security and Medicare. We are spending $1 trillion just to carry the debt this year, more than we’re spending in the military. And that is not sustainable. So we’re going to have to find a way to bring everybody into the tax system.
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