Taxem os Milionários para a Economia Crescer: Entrevista com Emmanuel Saez

Emmanuel Saez é o economista do momento, ele diz exatamente o que a esquerda intelectual Americana quer ouvir: que taxar milionários é o caminho para diminuir a desigualdade de renda e para crescer. Suas idéias desenvolvidas ao lado de Thomas Piketty, outro economista francês, é o que motivou o governo socialista francês a sobretaxar os milionários. If we define rent in terms of situations where pay doesn’t correspond to what economists call ‘marginal productivity’—that is, the economic contribution a person is providing—I would say yes, because the evolution of income concentration over time and across countries has a number of features that are inconsistent with the story where pay is everywhere equal to productivity. The changes in income concentration are just too abrupt and too closely correlated with policy developments for the standard story about pay equaling productivity to hold everywhere. That is, if pay is equal to productivity, you would think that deep economic changes in skills would evolve slowly and make a gradual difference in the distribution—but what we see in the data are very abrupt changes. Basically all western countries had very high levels of income concentration up to the first decades of the 20th century and then income concentration fell dramatically in most western countries following the historical narrative of each country. For example, in the United States the Great Depression followed by the New Deal and then World War II. And I could go on with other countries. Symmetrically, the reversal—that is, the surge in income concentration in some but not all countries—follows political developments closely. You see the highest increases in income concentration in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, following precisely what has been called the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions: deregulation, cuts in top tax rates, and policy changes that favored upper-income brackets. You don’t see nearly as much of an increase in income concentration in countries such as Japan, Germany, or France, which haven’t gone through such sharp, drastic policy changes.(...)tax policy has been a tried instrument. If we had had that conversation a century ago, when no country had started really steep progressive taxation, you might legitimately have told me, “You are making a theoretical case. How can I trust you are not going to break the economy?” But we’ve seen all major western countries go through periods of very high taxation of top incomes that have indeed reduced deep concentration of pre-tax income without hurting economic growth.