Rich Mintz  

In Megan McArdle’s post “Why We Can’t Just Keep Raising Taxes on the Rich”, she notes that there’s a marginal tax rate beyond which tax avoidance behaviors start to be more attractive, and that that rate (empirically speaking) seems to be in the vicinity of 50 percent:

Paying more than half their income in taxes violates most people’s sense of fairness. More importantly, the higher the marginal rate, the bigger the payoff from tax avoidance–and the more you can afford to pay smart tax lawyers while still coming out ahead yourself.

I think this is probably right on both counts. A decade or more ago I knew people who relocated to Florida and New Hampshire solely for tax reasons, and I thought they were insane, but the older I get and the more I start thinking about retiring someday (yes, I know, ack!), the less sure I am. I instantly got more interested in tax avoidance when I moved from Georgia (a very low-tax state) to New York City (subject to a high New York state rate, a separate New York City income tax, and on top of that an “unincorporated business tax” seen nowhere else that feels incredibly punitive to those of us new to the city). I haven’t done anything about it, except at the margins (incrementally more charitable giving, and so forth), but you can bet that if someone came to me and said “for a thousand bucks a year in perpetuity, I’ll give you a legal way to cut your tax burden by X percent” or whatever, I’d at least buy them a cup of coffee and hear about it. And, for the record, I’m not even “rich”!

None of this means I don’t appreciate the benefits of living in a high-tax, high-service jurisdiction like New York. I moved here on purpose, for a number of good reasons, and wanting to experience life in a place with a strong social contract (excellent public services and community amenities, and one of America’s strongest social safety nets) was one of them. But they call New York expensive because it is expensive, and even in New York (a place where, a year or so ago, millionaires supported in public a proposal to slap a surtax on their incomes to cover the budget gap in basic services, even as some of them unsuccessfully lobbied in private to kill it), there’s a limit to how high you can turn up the dial.

As McArdle notes, we’re pulling ever closer to that 50% threshold, so watch out.

Matthew Yglesias thinks that Senators get to wiggle out of responsibility for the disruption they cause through inaction and delay. To place a hold on a nomination, he suggests, a Senator should have to stand on his head in the Senate chamber and formally pronounce words like “I, Senator Richard Mintz of New York, wish to postpone a vote on [name] until tomorrow, February 6, 2010″ — and then do it again tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that, or else the hold expires. He would graciously allow the Senator “an assist from staff if necessary,” at least on the headstand part. Now that’s a government reform I could get behind!

If you have today off work (as I do) and you’re spending the day (as I am) catching up on some combination of [laundry|dishes|work email|bills|picture-hanging|TiVo|letters to family|closet organizing|etc.-ad-nauseam], don’t forget to take some time to reflect on why today’s a holiday in the first place. Maybe you want to start here, with “Ten OTHER Things Martin Luther King Said” (video, 2 min.), from Jay Smooth’s Ill Doctrine hip-hop video blog. (Posted by Sam Graham-Felsen.)

If you’re feeling more substantive:

• Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (video, 22 min.)
• AFSCME documentary on the Memphis sanitation strike (video, 10 min.)
• David Halberstam, The Children (via Amazon.com)

Don’t miss today’s NYT story , by David Carr and Tim Arango, on Roger Ailes, the political consultant and media executive who built the powerful force that is today’s Fox News.

Those of us who are of a certain age remember Ailes’ previous acts in politics — he’s been on the national stage since Richard Nixon ran for President. Impelled by heartland paranoia (Joe McGinniss, who wrote The Selling of the President 1968, says that Ailes “holds onto what he envisions to be the values of the heartland and is suspicious of people on either coast,” and this comes through in the story), informed by an awareness of trends that could be exploited, advanced by an keen eye of what works on TV and a willingness to test and revise, Ailes will make Murdoch a reported $700 million this year. That’s more value for its corporate owners than all the other major U.S. television news operations combined.