🧵Thread on @gabriel_zucman's claim that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the average American, as published in yesterday's @nytimes.

The short version: Zucman manipulates his data to fit a pro-tax political narrative. You can see this by comparing to his own earlier work. In 2018 Zucman (along with Piketty and Saez) published an article in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics, estimating the avg effective tax rate on top income groups. They argued that the gap between top and bottom earner tax rates had closed due to payroll taxes.

The NY Times article about billionaire tax rates is engaging in intentional deception.

Graph below shows his original published statistics in blue vs. what he told the NYT in orange. The change came from manipulating how he assigned corp tax incidence.

nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Its author Gabriel Zucman is also engaging in another deception by reclassifying unrealized capital gains as "income."

The problem: that's not what the tax code or the constitution say.

Income is governed by the realization principle, meaning it must be earned to be taxed.

This is false.

Zucman's own statistics (before he manipulated them for the New York Times by altering tax incidence to support his narrative) show the top 1%'s average tax rate has barely changed since 1962. #communitynotes Here are Zucman's own stats before he manipulated them to fit his story.

1962 tax rate was 39%. 2014 was 36%.

Top 10% income share in the US using different approaches and sources. As usual, the Piketty-Saez (blue) is the outlier and presents an exaggerated depiction of rising inequality. 1/ Note that there are differences in the series & sources.

Piketty-Saez and Geloso-Magness are from IRS tax data. Geloso-Magness is generally lower because it corrects for accounting and data entry errors in Piketty-Saez, reducing overall inequality. 2/

Today seems like an appropriate time to remind everybody that @Harvard's epidemiology department employs a Marxist activist with no actual medical expertise.

He has a long history of calling for real scientists to be fired for opposing the Covid lockdowns
campusreform.org/article/harvar… @Harvard Here he is a few weeks ago bragging about how he pushed a communist political screed into a mainstream medical journal.

🧵Since commemorative statues are being reevaluated in light of their connections to atrocities, racism, etc., here's the case for why we need a commission on the Karl Marx monument in London's Highgate Cemetery. First, should Marx be canceled? The arguments:

1. Marx's system has a disastrous and bloody track record, including a 20th century body count of ~100 million

2. Marx endorsed revolutionary violence of the type his followers enacted

3. Marx was a vicious racist & anti-semite

🧵Most academics who claim to study "neoliberalism" have an origin myth about the term. They believe it was coined by free-market economists at the Colloque Walter Lippmann in 1938.

Except it isn't true. The term had been around in German-language sources since the 1920s. 1/ The CWL briefly considered the term as a label at the suggestion of Alexander Ruestow...then rejected it.

The most likely reason for rejection? Because the far-left and far-right in Germany already used it as a pejorative to describe free-market classical liberal economists.

Richard Delgado, co-founder of CRT and participant in the original conference where the term was coined, has openly described its originators as a gathering of Marxists.

The reason why CRT is frequently described as a Marxist school of thought is because they said so themselves.

https://twitter.com/deonteleologist/status/1746967032581767648

Here is CRT co-founder Charles R. Lawrence recounting another early gathering from 1990. It involved a speech by CRT co-founder Mari Matsuda where she explicitly traced her formative CRT contributions to adaptations of her openly Marxist father's teachings about capitalism.

This convoluted editorial argues that Claudine Gay should keep her job because her plagiarism was "unintentional" (how does one "unintentionally" make small edits to conceal a lifted passage btw?), and because her critics' motives are in "bad faith" 1/

thecrimson.com/article/2023/1… Calling something "bad faith" has become a default weapon to dismiss an otherwise factually true assessment of scholarly misconduct that, taken on its merits, would thoroughly discredit the perpetrator. 2/

Critical Theory is little more than a conspiracist epistemology to rationalize why none of Marx's predictions panned out and why the revolution didn't happen the way he promised. To wit: Marxism views its aims as inevitable & the historical progression to those aims as if they were scientifically deduced certainties.

Except it's nothing of the sort. Instead the mechanism of Marxist collective organizing is completely undermined by Olsonian freeridership.

Why do you keep lying about this, @gabriel_zucman?

Auten & Splinter absolutely show an increase in the top 1% *pre-tax* income. It's just not skyrocketing like your politically manipulated stats claim. @gabriel_zucman The key Auten-Splinter figure is here. Their pre-tax measure shows an increase. It's only flat when you look at after-tax income...which demonstrates that our highly progressive federal tax system has already offset the rise in inequality.

This is false. The Piketty-Saez series uses an inappropriate denominator for tax data, substantially exaggerating income inequality at both tails of the U shaped pattern. Also false. The Piketty tax data component is riddled with accounting errors. When you correct for those, inequality goes down in the entire series. Piketty has adamantly refused to correct them.

Breaking: new FOIAs out of the NIH. In Nov 2020 a pair of NIH officials drafted a crazy memo to the FDA chief on implementing a national N95 mask mandate. The memo likens the mandate to emergency wartime powers, such as the suspension of habeas corpus.

More coming soon. Here's the downright crazy part where they try to legally justify this stuff under emergency executive powers to overcome any "resistance" to the mandate.

If Marxists want better critics, they also need to do a better job at making their own arguments.

To paraphrase Keynes, most Marxists approach Marx's texts as received documents from on high. They also treat their critics as heretics from that text.

jacobin.com/2023/05/marxis… Rather than engage with serious - indeed damning - criticisms of Marx's system, Marxists far more often try to handwave them away by designating them "bourgeois" arguments (i.e. heresies) and claiming that they're just ploys to maintain and preserve power disparities in society.

The chain of modern use of "neoliberalism" derives from Foucault's posthumously published 1979 lectures about his archival digging in the transcripts of the 1938 conference where Mises rejected the term.

This is not difficult, unless, like Kuehn, you reject linear time. *1939 transcripts.

And yes, Foucault is quite clear that he found it while doing archival research.

Well...

1. The publication of Foucault's lectures are what sparked the 90s boom

2. Gide's article had all of 2 citations between 1898 and the 90s when people first noticed it used the term

3. It's Othmar Spann & his chapter on neoliberalism was in a widely used econ textbook As usual, Kuehn has strong opinions about a subject in which he lacks basic competence. Yet somehow he thinks I'm at fault for that...

Synthetic Karl Marx returns for another round!

In this new working paper, we investigate our critics' claim that the SPD popularized Marxism in Germany with its 1891 Erfurt Program, long before Lenin came along.

Turns out our critics were wrong.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf… Our main finding may be seen here. The Erfurt Program appears to give Marx's citations a very modest boost in 1891.

Except (1) it isn't statistically significant, and (2) it's dwarfed by 1917, which does past muster for significance.

Synthetic Karl Marx is returning for another round.

Preview: John Ganz and all the other twitter warriors who claimed that the SPD popularized Marx before 1917 are simply wrong and don't know what they're talking about. For reference, here's Ganz's claim from back in November about the SPD.

We tested it by using the 1891 Erfurt Program as a treatment, and he's simply wrong.

https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1592205026952622081

One of the stranger myths of the Brown v. Board aftermath is that Arlington County, VA bucked the "Massive Resistance" movement of the state and permitted integration. Not true! In 1956, the Arlington school board voted 3-0 to fight court-ordered desegregation in appellate court The Arlington school board consistently affirmed this position in the desegregation era, adopting resolutions that pursued every available avenue. The language of these resolutions clearly sided with preserving segregation.

In today's NY Times, @jonathanmahler tries to smear Milton Friedman's 1955 school voucher proposal by invoking an outright fraudulent working paper Nancy MacLean.

In reality, Friedman explicitly argued for using vouchers as a tool to undermine segregation. I documented this history a few years ago at the WSJ, including presenting evidence of how segregationists in Virginia teamed up with the teachers unions to oppose vouchers, which they claimed would lead to the "negro engulfment" of white schools.

wsj.com/articles/schoo…

Gordon Tullock enjoyed military history, often studying scenarios of decisionmaking by different commanders.

It would be a mistake to use this hobby as a basis for projecting the politics of a given war onto him. Strange: Kuehn's now stalker-responding to tweets of mine that aren't even addressed at him.

Even stranger: I am easily the object of a large plurality of Kuehn's attention on this site even though he also plays a bizarre ding-dong-ditch game of block/reply/block with my account