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In the long run, lawmakers should keep in mind that tax rates are far from the only reason a rich person might consider flight: Decaying infrastructure and degrading public services are surely just as important.
Perhaps the country's most pressing problem is its high uninsured rate. Every other country as wealthy as the United States has figured out how to cover its entire population, generally at a much lower cost, too.
During a coronavirus-induced downturn, families will be at greater risk for food insecurity, eviction, and job loss; kids will go hungry; food pantries and social-service organizations will come under more strain.
The risk that people pose to wolfdogs is far greater, statistically, than the risk that wolfdogs pose to people. Many are bred in miserable, inhumane conditions, and kept in equally miserable, inhumane conditions.
The Millennials graduated into the worst jobs market in 80 years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple years living in their parents' basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages.
Ending child poverty, stopping the opioid crisis, improving child nutrition, providing a high-quality public education to students, ending the racial wealth gap: These kinds of policies would boost the economy, too.
Numerous studies have shown income inequality growing since the late 1970s. Real earnings have fallen for many families, with globalization, the decline of unions and technological innovations eroding workers' wages.
The Trump administration, for its part, has pushed for childcare to basically be written off on your taxes, which would subsidize the wealthiest families the most but would act as a significant subsidy to all families.
As a general point, the United States has an extreme budget commitment to prisons, guns, warplanes, armored vehicles, detention facilities, courts, jails, drones, and patrols - to law and order, meted out discriminately.
The rise of populist movements and the shrinking of the middle class - with all the economic pain and political turbulence that comes with that - seems to have increased the appetite of both parties for dramatic proposals.
In Opportunity Zones, as they are called, investors will receive huge tax breaks for building office parks, warehouses, housing, grocery stores, and the like, helping to ease poverty and end blight in distressed communities.
Both the federal government and the states should go ahead and soak the rich to reduce inequality and raise money for health care, child care, infrastructure investment, education, decarbonization, and a thousand other priorities.
A thin safety net, an expansive security state: This is the American way. At all levels of government, the country spends roughly double on police, prisons, and courts what it spends on food stamps, welfare, and income supplements.
In functioning high-income countries, the government guarantees the provision of essential goods and services: medical care, transit between cities, supplies for public schools, financial support to weather a period of unemployment.
When economists talk about income, they talk about the money a household or a person earns in a given year. That's the salary you earned, the rent from a tenant above your garage and the bit of money you made by selling some stocks.
Home-health and personal-care work is one of the country's fastest-growing occupational sectors. But it is one marked by low pay and meager benefits, a problem that might become more urgent as the U.S.'s population continues to age.
The cost-of-living crisis extends beyond housing. Health-care costs are exorbitant, too: Americans pay roughly twice as much for insurance and medical services as do citizens of other wealthy countries, but they don't have better outcomes.
After moving to California, I went on a no-buy streak. I began refusing short plane trips, using public transit or walking whenever possible, and turning the air-conditioning down. I even started carrying around a water bottle or a mason jar.
Wolves are afraid of humans, whereas dogs are not. Wolves hunt game, whereas dogs scavenge human leftovers or eat what their human companions put out for dinner. Wolves are not great at following human commands, whereas dogs are brilliant at it.
Immigrant families pay taxes. They work. They start businesses. They spend money in their communities. They join native-born families in being economically productive, both paying money to the government and receiving benefits from the government.
Conspiracy theories themselves are big business, of course, selling books, videos, conferences, and all kinds of merch. Then there is the economy that promotes conspiracy theories to sell goods such as supplements, survival gear, and yes, bunkers.
Many economists and industry experts agree that the United States faces unfair competition and artificially low prices that have damaged the domestic steel industry. But they don't agree that a tariff is the right approach for addressing the problem.
The student-loan crisis has an underappreciated emotional valence too: The debt makes people miserable. In one survey, more than half of borrowers said that they have experienced depression because of their debt. Nine in 10 reported experiencing anxiety.
Talking with economists, climate scientists, and psychologists convinced me that depersonalizing climate change, such that the only answers are systemic, is a mistake of its own. It misses how social change is built on a foundation of individual practice.
Even very low-income communities are seeing rising rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease as a result. But many countries lack the tax revenue and medical infrastructure to treat such conditions, leading to a burgeoning global-health crisis.
It is a country that professes to care for babies. But in the United States, the infant death rate is twice as high as in similarly wealthy countries. Premature birth and low birth weight are common ailments, with lifelong and even intergenerational effects.
Making a paper straw requires growing a tree, cutting it down, and pulping and pressing it into a tube. Manufacturers then use fossil fuels to ship the straws to stores and cafes. Many paper straws on the market are not even compostable or recyclable, as promised.
Americans are no less susceptible to disease, joblessness, and family changes than their peers in rich nations, but they are made more fragile by these crises. The country has a thinner safety net, fewer public goods, and less social insurance than other countries.
The things to watch are whether the country's borrowing costs are rising, whether its budgetary allotment for payments on the debt is increasing, and whether it is spending on good priorities. Those big, scary debt numbers are not as big and scary as they used to be.
Cell-based meat, or 'clean' meat - real meat produced in labs - has not become a commercial product yet. But analysts expect it to hit the shelves in 2021 or soon thereafter, and start-ups in this space, such as Memphis Meats, have raised tens of millions of dollars.
Lower-income immigrant families might receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. But that mathematical equilibrium is temporary, and an artifact of the way the tax-and-transfer system is structured to help lower-income families and to support families with kids.
The Trump administration, to its credit, has initiatives on housing. It has initiatives on child care. It does not have true initiatives in terms of making health care more affordable and covering the remaining millions of Americans who do not have insurance coverage.
Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they do not remember the Mariel boatlift or the SALT treaties or the Cuban missile crisis.
Kids of the 1980s and 1990s have had a new, huge, financially catastrophic demand on their meager post-recession earnings, too: a trillion dollars of educational debt. About a quarter of Gen Xers who went to college took out loans to do so, compared with half of Millennials.
For animals, for humans, for the planet: It makes sense to curb meat consumption, and that is something vegans and omnivores agree on. Roughly two-thirds of Americans report reducing their meat consumption, and many are sensitive to the way their diet might be damaging the planet.
So overall in the entire economy, the issue is not that health care costs are growing dramatically. The issue is that the burden placed on families is. So just between 2010 and 2016, the cost burden of family private insurance premiums jumped 28%, whereas incomes rose less than 20%.
The Paycheck Protection Program created in the CARES Act did help many small businesses keep employees on their books in the early days of the pandemic. But many small firms are ailing now; the hospitality industry has been decimated; and state and local governments are shedding workers.
Local tax increases can cause high-net-worth individuals to move, tax experts said; tax avoidance and tax arbitrage are multitrillion-dollar affairs, and rich people are sensitive to tax rates. But many of the people who move when their home state raises taxes are close to retirement anyway.
Indeed, the share of teachers in a union has fallen to less than half, driven in part by older, unionized teachers retiring, the rise of certain districts' reliance on charters and other private education options, and legal changes that have curtailed the ability of unions to bargain on behalf of workers.
Recycling, cutting back on driving, and changing out old light bulbs for energy-efficient ones might save half a ton of carbon a year. A household going car-free, flight-free, and vegan - changes impractical, if not outright impossible, for many families to make - might reduce emissions by four tons a year.
In the longer term, immigrants contribute more to the government's coffers than they receive in social spending. Moreover, these programs are not just welfare or a handout, but also an investment, helping ensure that families are healthy, educated, and able to work and support themselves over the course of generations.
Fires in California and Oregon are incinerating homes, businesses, schools, power lines, and roads. Hurricanes in the Gulf Coast are swamping mobile homes and carrying away cars and livestock. The United States faces the potential task of relocating towns and cities and fortifying others, trapped in an endless cycle of destruction and rebuilding.