By Count Friedrich von Olsen
According to an article that ran in the Washington Post earlier this month, Jason Furman, an economics professor at Harvard who chaired the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, said, “The rich definitely pay less in taxes than they did in the past and less than they should.” I’m afraid I disagree with half of that. I think government in general has just gotten too expensive. I think rich and poor and middle class and working class and everyone alike are nowadays paying too much in taxes…
In “The Triumph of Injustice,” economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California at Berkeley found in their analysis of Americans’ tax rates since the 1960s that in 2018 the average effective tax rate paid by the richest 400 families in the country was 23 percent, a full percentage point lower than the 24.2 percent rate paid by the bottom half of American households. I agree that there is a disparity here and that the rich, such as myself, should be paying more in taxes than the poor among us or even those who are not poor and are just getting by or those who are doing well who are not fabulously wealthy…
I should note that things have gotten better. In 1980, the 400 richest people in America (I was one of them) had an effective tax rate of 47 percent. In 1960, their tax rate was as high as 56 percent. The effective tax rate paid by the bottom 50 percent, by contrast, has changed little over time…
What this means is that most Americans – and by most Americans I mean ones who must work and earn money to keep body and soul together – are paying very close to 25 percent of what they earn in taxes. This is simply too much…
So, how much did I personally pay in taxes this year? The fact is, I’m not quite sure. And when I say I’m not quite sure, that means my thirteen – count them, thirteen! –accountants and advisors (I refer to them as my tax dodgers) are not themselves sure. Bear in mind that I am not just paying tribute to Uncle Sam. I pay taxes in half of just about everywhere – Great Britain, Ireland, Norway, Italy, France, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Cypress, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, India, Bahrain, Canada, Portugal, France, Bimini, the Bahamas, Brazil, Venezuela, São Tomé and Príncipe, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mauritania, Liberia, Qatar, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Madagascar. I think I missed a few. The best estimate is somewhere around $487 million last year, give or take $1 million or so. And it would have been a lot more than that if I hadn’t had a few write-offs, the major one of which was the total loss of the Darnya, for $213 million, after its second mate scratched the bottom out of the damn thing on some coral shoals off of Los Morritos. You might have heard about that. On top of the ship write-off was another $17 million I had to pay to have the scavengers haul it off and $1.2 million in maritime fines and an environmental penalty to the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, which after all is a type of a tax, if you think about it, except you get to write it off. I’m not prepared to say whether any of those other countries provided me with the same write-off…
All of this has me thinking about money, the actual stuff. Did you know that flipping a coin will not actually give you a random response? By random response, I mean fifty percent heads and fifty percent tails. People have actually studied this. One guy flipped coins to see the frequency of heads versus tails. Another took it to a further level, flipping the same coin over and over and then comparing it to what happened when he used a whole bunch of coins, that is, not the same coin but a different one each time. In some experiments, the coins were flipped a mere few hundred times. In others, thousands. In one experiment, heads came up more than tails. In another, tails more than heads. According to one researcher, a controlling factor in the outcomes was whether before the toss the coin was heads up or tails up. His finding was that if the coin started heads up, it was more often than not heads up when it landed. If it was tails up to start with, it ended tails up more often than tails down. There was a difference in outcomes, it seems, between just letting the coin land and then catching it in your palm and then slapping it down on your forearm or the back of your other hand to do the reading. Another factor was the hardness or softness of the surface upon which the coin landed…
Here is one from my own observation: sometimes, a minute number of times I will admit, the coin will land as neither heads nor tails. I was in a market once when the customer in front of me fanned on one of the coins, a penny in fact, that the clerk was handing back to him. It landed on the ground between us, flipped about and then started rolling on its edge. It went on a couple of feet like this, curving a bit, and then came to a stop, still upright on its edge, neither heads nor tails. I know this was not the flip of a coin, per se, but close enough for me…
Enough about coins. How about paper currency? What’s in your wallet? Do you have any hundreds? Currently, Benjamin Franklin is on the U.S. one hundred dollar note. That is just about the largest dollar value U.S. bill you are likely to see. There are, however, $500 bills. The most recent ones printed are from between 1928 and 1934. They depict William McKinley on the front. The thousand dollar bill, most recently printed between 1928 and 1934, features Grover Cleveland…
There are also $5,000 bills, printed between 1928 and 1934, but they no longer circulate. And there are $10,000 bills, also printed between 1928 and 1934, which do not circulate. There is also a $100,000 bill. These were printed in 1934, with Woodrow Wilson on the front. They were never circulated and therefore, to actually possess one is a crime, indeed a felony. It used to be that $5,000 and $10,000 bills were used for transfers between banks. For some reason or other, the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing bought as many of them back as it could get and destroyed them. Now, $5,000 bills are almost exclusively in the hands of collectors…
A few of the $10,000 bills, which depict Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the treasury to President Abraham Lincoln, are in museums, so you can actually see one if you wish. There are roughly 350 $10,000 bills known to yet exist.
$5,000 bills are something different. There were over 51,000 1934 $5,000 Federal Reserve notes printed. At present there are fewer than 30 known to yet exist. While $10,000 bills, like most large denominations, are worth far more than their face value, the $5,000 bill, which features a portrait of James Madison, are worth even more than the denomination with twice its face value. Indeed, one $5,000 bill in mint condition recently sold for $352,500. The highest amount recently paid for an excellent condition $10,000 bill was $258,500…
At present, I have only one $5,000 bill in my collection and two $10,000 bills. If you or anyone you know has one of those and you or they would like to sell it, get a hold of me. I’ll pay good money for what you have…