The market for collectibles is booming. Be it luxury race cars, paintings, stamps,
coins, vintage wines or classic guitars, wealthy people are willing to pay a
lot more money than they used to for possessions imbued with special value by
society or certain elite groups in society.
And why not? They have more money to spend thanks to wage stagnation and
a low tax regime.
The climb in what the rich are willing to pay for a 1957
Ferrari or a Cezanne landscape has been precipitous. The Economist, for example, has put together a super index of various indices of luxury valuables. While the stock markets of the developed
world have increased by 147% in the past ten years, the Economist says its “valuables index” has shot up by 211% during the
same time frame.
The Economist also
reports that companies are creating funds that invest in stamps, classic
guitars, wine and equine blood stock (racing horses). That’s right—instead of
investing in initial start-ups of solar and wind technology companies, rich
folk can invest in funds that buy stamps or classic guitars and hope for
continued inflation in these “valuables.”
Those who want to keep taxes on the wealthy at low levels
always fall back on the old saw that wealthy people need all that money to
create jobs. But what jobs are created
by bidding up the price of 50-year-old guitars or 75-year-old stamps? None. It’s just an exchange of funds between
wealthy folks who have nothing better to do with their money. They certainly
aren’t investing it in creating jobs.
But the government would have a lot of things better to do
with this money. It could increase unemployment and food stamp benefits, which
would give money to people who would spend it immediately for goods and
services, creating jobs to fill the additional demand. The government could
spend it on fixing our highways and bridges and expanding mass transit,
especially between suburbs and city centers, which would create jobs. It could
subsidize research into alternative energy and more energy efficient
technologies, which would create jobs. It could increase the number of
government health, food, safety and environmental inspections, which would
create jobs.
We’ve created jobs through government spending before. During
the ‘50s and ‘60s when income taxes on the wealthy were much higher than today,
federal and state government supported an expansion in higher education that
made U.S. universities the envy of the world and a inexpensive bargain for
students. During that high-tax era, we also built a wonderful interstate system
of highways and improved public schools by reducing class size, hiring more
specialist teachers and building state-of-the-art school buildings. As most
readers will know, we now remember the ‘50s and ‘60s as an age of prosperity
for most Americans. Taxes on the wealthy were not high then; they are too low
now.
Thirty some odd years into the low-tax-on-wealthy regime
started by Ronald Reagan, we have a crumbling transportation infrastructure,
college education is becoming increasingly unaffordable, public pension plans
are underfunded and states are throwing needy people off food stamp and
unemployment insurance rolls. We have little money to invest in the
technologies that will potentially save us from human-induced global warming
and resource shortages. Public school districts are firing teachers everywhere.
Mass transit systems are cutting routes and vehicles everywhere.
Was it worth destroying our social fabric so that the
wealthy could have the money to pay more for an old painting?
I must admit that the frequent record purchases of art work
and other valuables have made gossip and lifestyle columns much more
interesting in our age of plutocratic conspicuous consumption. But in most
other ways the country was better off when the rich paid more taxes.
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