The Week: The Right Turns Against the Rich

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1:26Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Welcome to the week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, August 21st. first. Today, the case for a wealth tax. Then, Tucker Carlson, populist economics, and a Republican base that's beginning to lose faith in Trump's economy. And finally, how decisions China made decades ago are shaping the race for energy and AI today.

2:11Let's get into it. Last Friday, Prof G Markets closed out the summer with Gabriel Zuckman, the French economist who helped design California's Prop 40, the one-time 5 % tax on billionaire wealth that voters will decide on in November. His argument isn't that billionaires are bad people. It's that the income tax structurally can't reach them. If you look at the income tax pay, the California income tax paid by California billionaires, this accounts for about 2%, 2 % of total California income tax revenue. This is equivalent to 0.2 % of their wealth. They pay very little in income tax because they find ways to report no taxable income.

3:05So that's the current situation. It's as if they lived in their own parallel society, free of tax. Everybody contributes to the public infrastructure, the education system, the universities, the healthcare system, which has allowed them to thrive, which has allowed their businesses to grow, to be successful, but they don't contribute. That's the current situation. Many people in California, millions of homeowners, pay a wealth tax. They pay property taxes. The property tax is typically around a bit more than 1 % of the value of their homes. But people who have a mortgage, which is the vast majority of homeowners, the property tax relative to the net wealth of those people, if it's done the mortgage, so relative to their true equity, their true wealth, the property tax rate can be way higher than 1 % per year.

4:14You know, so you have millions of people who already have relatively high annual wealth tax rates when the billionaires are almost tax free. This is this situation which, frankly, is unacceptable and that Prop 40 tries to begin addressing. Then Ed asked the obvious question. Why now? Zuckman's answer was that billionaire wealth has grown too large and too undertaxed to ignore. And so that's why also that's the fundamental thing that has changed over the last decade. If you compute this ratio, you know, how big is billionaire wealth relative to total income for the population? the ratio was about 10 % in the 1980s, 1990s, meaning the government revenue at stake from taxing billionaires were not very high.

5:14And I think many people have remained stuck in the 1980s, 1990s, where they think, well, the billionaires are so few in number that perhaps they don't pay a lot of tax, but who really cares because there's not a lot of money at stake. And that might have been true at the time, But today that their wealth has become as large as the total income of the entire population, the situation is just completely different. And when there is a revenue shortfall, like today in California, the most logical starting point is with this massive undertaxed base. Wealth as political power. That's also the bet Paul Begala thinks the next Republican nominee is going to make.

5:58On Tuesday's Raging Moderates, Jessica Tarlov interviewed Begala, Clinton strategist, longtime moderate, and someone who co-hosted a show with Tucker Carlson for years. Jessica asked how realistic a Carlson presidential run is. Begala thinks he runs, wins the nomination, and does it on a platform that his own side won't see coming. Tucker will whip them all. He will kick their asses. And he's putting together what I believe may be the future of the right, which is populist economics wedded to populist culture. They always had this elitist economics wedded to populist culture. And I think Tucker is going to come full Bernie on the economy.

6:44He's going to attack concentrations of wealth. He's going to support unions. Maybe I'm wrong, but there's a holistic argument here, a seamless garment of populism, where he's going to hate. the malefactors of great wealth, and the immigrants. And, you know, to piece that all together. And I think there's a lot of power in that. I'm terribly worried for my country. I wouldn't support any of that stuff. But I think, I'm telling you, he's the most talented guy out there, and Canada talent matters. Begala is describing a Republican Party running against wealth. Shane Goldmacher of The New York Times was on Monday's Raging Moderates episode, and his numbers suggest why that lane is even open.

7:27If you look at polling, there's the top line question is, do you approve of Donald Trump or not? And those numbers are bad. But I think it's the demographics inside those numbers that are really troubling for the Republican Party, which is the one base, the thing that he's been his floor for the 10 years that he's been in national politics, in between even when he was out of power, is that white working class voters, white voters who did not graduate from college, have basically trusted him forever on the core question of taking care of them economically. They trusted him on fixing the economy, managing the economy, and that trust has eroded.

8:07And in a number of polls, he is upside down. So more Republicans no longer approve of him on the economy than disapprove of him. That's a sea change. in 2018, his first midterm. So when Republicans lost in a blue wave, his approval rating on the economy among white working class voters was still two to one. It was like 65 % to 30%. Now it's 55, 50 % against him. That is just a deep, deep problem for Trump and for Republicans because that's a problem everywhere. It's a demographic shift against the party in their own base. We know that Donald Trump historically has turned off independent voters in these midterm elections.

8:50If he has a discouraged base, that's a deeper problem. We'll be right back after the break.

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12:28Welcome back. From American politics, we turn to the global race for energy. On Thursday's Conversations episode, Scott spoke with Hannah Ritchie, an Oxford researcher and the deputy editor of Our World in Data. She writes about climate, mostly through energy, where it comes from, who's building it, and how fast. Scott asked whether energy prices decide the AI race, Europe with the most expensive energy, the U.S. in the middle, China the cheapest. And he wanted to know whether that gap decides who wins the AI race. Ritchie told him he was measuring the wrong thing. I think it could be a bottleneck for Europe.

13:10I think when it comes to the U.S. and China, I would think that it is less about prices and more about the pace by which they can build infrastructure. So the challenge when it comes to power demand for AI is that Europe and the US have actually gone through a very, very long period of not really building out an electricity grid, right? Electricity demand across Europe has actually fallen in the last 30 years. In the US, it basically hasn't grown much at all. And now we're starting to see this huge demand from AI. And the question is, can the US build out electricity grids as quickly as to keep up with that demand?

13:51I think when you look at China, China is just building electricity sources extremely, extremely quickly. So to put into context, in just a single year, China's electricity generation is increasing by a Germany-sized grid. That's how much additional electricity they are producing every single year. And that's been the rate over the past few years now. I just want to make sure I have that right, because that was staggering. China is adding the electricity, the electric grid of Germany every year? Yes. And last year, all of that came from solar and wind. So they are deploying electricity sources very quickly.

14:31And I think what surprises people is that most of that is now green or clean energy. And the U.S. and Europe have kind of reached this kind of stagnant state where they're just not used to building out infrastructure at anywhere near that pace. And I think that could be the real bottleneck when it comes to AI and other electricity generation. Scott's read was that China is simply making sharper investments than everybody else. Ritchie's correction was that it isn't recent and it wasn't really about the climate. So even though China is building new coal plants at actually a pretty rapid rate, that doesn't actually mean that they are burning more coal or will burn more coal.

15:14It's more of this kind of adaptive thing. But yeah, it's often framed as a paradox because they are still a huge emitter. At the same time, they are really, really leaning into these technologies, as I said, domestically, but also for export. I think what's really key here, and I think what maybe gets lost, is that this wasn't a very recent sudden transition or decision, well, maybe that's what we should do over the next decade. This has been part of an industrial strategy that has been going on and been planned for decades, right? So China was experiencing strong economic growth. Its population would eventually want cars and transport.

15:55It doesn't have oil. It doesn't want to have to buy oil. and it couldn't compete with the US and Germany and Europe on building combustion engine cars. What was its way to energy security was to build really good electric vehicles and renewable technologies such that it could serve that demand without becoming energy insecure like many other countries in the world. So that's been decades in the making and it's now coming to fruition, but it did take huge amounts, huge investments very, very early on when these technologies were very, very expensive. And part of what China has done, along with other countries as well, that invested early, has dramatically brought down the prices for the rest of the world and many other countries in the world will ultimately benefit from that.

16:41That kind of long-term strategy was made possible by an earlier economic transformation. Tuesday's China Decode looked back at one of its central architects, Zhu Rongji, premiered from 1998 to 2003, who died last week at 97. He's credited with two decisions that changed the country, taking China into the WTO and privatizing the housing market. China Decode co-host James King covered him at the time and remembers one announcement in particular. And honestly, it was like the whole room was hushed. the hair on the back of my neck stood up. He was quoting poetry. He was sounding the most assured, I think, that anyone had seen a Chinese official until that point.

17:35And he just announced that the Chinese housing market would be privatized. These days, about 90 % of urban households own their own property. And about 70 % of the country's total household wealth is held in the form of property. And just as an estimate, the total residential and commercial real estate stock in China is estimated to be worth roughly 42 trillion US dollars. So we're talking enormous, enormous changes. And so my kind of summary of the Zhu Rongji premiership is that he did things that were very bruising for Chinese society at that time. A lot of people lost their livelihood, lost their job, lost their direction, lost their orientation in life.

18:33But the reforms that he pushed through are really responsible for the Chinese economic superpower that we see today. So you couldn't imagine a more consequential official. I would even go so far as to say that he could be one of the most consequential officials or politicians in the 21st century. The reforms were disruptive and deeply unpopular. But they helped create the industrial power China is wielding today. 30 years later, the rest of the world is still deciding how much short-term pain it will accept for long-term advantage. And one last thing. From Wednesday's office hours, Scott used to keep score with his father and why he recommends against it.

19:23And then I woke up and realized that the key to relationships is not keeping score, but outlining or identifying the kind of son, father, husband, co-worker you want to be, and just trying to live and acquit to that standard instead of keeping score because you'll naturally inflate your own contribution and diminish theirs. And also with your parents, just try and, and I don't know the situation, but most situations is your parents are highly imperfect, but they tried. And also, they're going to be dead soon. And I just, I haven't heard many people say after their parents were gone, I'm angry, I forgive them.

20:01I should have given them a harder time. I think it mostly goes the other way. So I would really try and err on the side of generosity for your own sake. I just think it feels good to forgive and move on, if you will, and try and enjoy their relationship. And on that note, that's it for the week. We're taking next week off, but we'll be back Friday, September 4th. I'm George Hahn. Until then, take care of yourselves and the people you love.

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