Binyamin Appelbaum

In October 1924, the federal government threw open for public inspection the files that recorded the incomes of American taxpayers, and the amounts they had paid in taxes.

Americans were gripped by a fever of interest in the finances of their neighbors. This newspaper devoted a large chunk of the front page to a list of the top taxpayers in Manhattan under a banner headline that read “J.D. Rockefeller Jr. Paid $7,435,169.” One story reported that a number of wives and ex-wives had lined up at a government office in New York to seek information about their present or former husbands. Journalists soon began to note the curious absence of some conspicuously wealthy people from the lists of top taxpayers.

Congress had ordered the disclosure as a weapon against tax fraud. “Secrecy is of the greatest aid to corruption,” said Sen. Robert Howell of Nebraska. “The price of liberty is not only eternal vigilance, but also publicity.”

There is every reason to think that sunlight served the desired purpose. One important piece of evidence is that wealthy Americans absolutely hated the disclosure law, and soon persuaded Congress to execute a U-turn.

Almost a century later, it’s time to revisit the merits of universal public disclosure. Democrats in Congress are fighting to obtain President Donald Trump’s tax returns under a separate 1924 law, written in response to related concerns about public corruption. That issue could be resolved, at least in part, if Congress embraced the broader case for publishing everyone’s tax bill.

Now as then, disclosure could help to ensure that people pay a fair share of taxes. Americans underpay their taxes by more than $450 billion each year, more than 10 percent of total federal revenue. Publishing a list of millionaires who paid little or no taxes this year could significantly reduce the number of millionaires who pay little or no taxes next year.

In Norway, where tax records have been public since the founding of the modern state in 1814, a newspaper put the records online in 2001. One study estimated that the records’ greater availability caused a 3.1 percent increase in the reported incomes of self-employed Norwegians over the next three years, perhaps because they feared exposure.

Disclosure also could help to reduce disparities in income, as well as disparities in tax payments. Inequality is easier to ignore in the absence of evidence. In Finland, where tax data is published each year on Nov. 1 — jovially known as National Jealousy Day — people treat the information as a barometer of whether inequality is yawning too wide.

Consider that public corporations are required to report the compensation of top executives — who check disclosures of rival companies to ensure they are not underpaid.

Another benefit would be identifying patterns of illegal discrimination against women or minorities. Lilly Ledbetter, for whom the 2009 fair pay law is named, would have learned a lot sooner that she was making less than her male colleagues at a Goodyear plant in Alabama if she could have looked up their annual incomes on a government website.

Transparency could even help to increase economic growth. People who know how much their co-workers are paid — and how much people are paid at other companies, and in other industries — can make better career decisions.

Tax data also is a rich source of information about American life. The IRS tightly limits access, but one of the few researchers allowed to work with that data, Harvard economist Raj Chetty, has produced a series of important studies illuminating the mechanics of economic inequality. He and his collaborators have shown that Americans have a dwindling chance of making more money than their parents, and that living in a good neighborhood as a child has a lifelong impact on earnings. One can only imagine what others might learn from the data.

Calling for more disclosure may seem discordant at a time of growing concern about privacy. But income taxation is an act of government, not an aspect of private life. Property tax records provide a reasonable model. Local governments disclose the name of the property owner, the value of the property and the amount of taxes owed and paid. The same information should be available for income taxes — nothing more is necessary.

Another reasonable rule: In Norway, it is a matter of public record when someone looks at tax records. Everyone can see who is nosing around. Wisconsin, which makes income and tax information available on request, imposes the same requirement.

Income taxation in the United States began in public view. When Congress imposed the first income tax in 1861, during the Civil War, it required the disclosure of names, incomes and tax payments. Over the following decade, before Congress ended the tax, this data was posted in public and printed in newspapers.

That practice was briefly revived in 1924. It’s time for another revival. The question is whether Americans are willing to endure a little sunlight in the interest of fairness and equality.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/opinion/sunday/taxes-public.html" id="c8def903-9560-3727-ace7-528497f140de">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer)

Everyone's Income Taxes Should Be Public

Just 35 years old, he is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He has become a hero to many because of the way he is living his final years and months and days. His body is giving up; he will not.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders sought out Barkan, who came from his home in California to testify in favor of universal Medicare eligibility.

A tour guide on a Segway saw Barkan outside the Capitol and briefly abandoned her tour to roll over and meet him. She seemed a little awe-struck. “Thank you for fighting,” she said.

Before his diagnosis, Barkan already was a rising star in the world of liberal activism. In the summer of 2014, he took eight workers and community activists to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to confront Federal Reserve policymakers at the central bank’s annual summer retreat. He believed that unions, churches and other liberal advocacy groups, which had long focused on microeconomic issues like minimum wage laws and mortgage aid programs, needed to pay more attention to the Fed’s role in shaping economic conditions. The first time I saw Barkan, he was standing in the lobby of the conference hotel, waiting to accost the Fed chairwoman, Janet Yellen, while wearing a green T-shirt that said “What Recovery?”

The foundation that paid for the trip, and for the “Fed Up” campaign that Barkan mounted in its aftermath, wrote in an internal assessment that it didn’t see much chance Barkan would succeed in influencing monetary policy. But that November, Yellen met with 30 workers led by Barkan in the Fed’s ornate boardroom in Washington. Two years later, in August 2016, the Fed’s summer retreat opened with a new event: Eight of the Fed’s top officials attending a meeting with “Fed Up” participants, listening to their stories.

Just a few weeks later, Barkan was spending a Sunday morning with a friend he had known since kindergarten, who happened to be a neurologist. He mentioned that his left hand felt weak, and she offered to take a look. By the end of the week, he had been told he was dying. He had just become a father; the doctors said he would be lucky to see his son turn 4.

For almost a year, Barkan allowed the imminence of death to dominate his life. But by the fall of 2017, he felt useless and restless. He wanted to spend time with those he loved, but he did not love the way he was spending time: He had lost a sense of purpose. He wanted to be a good father, but he was losing the ability to hold his son.

As congressional Republicans moved to pass a large tax cut, Barkan decided to cast himself in the role he had so often persuaded other people to play — as a living symbol of the stakes. He flew to Washington to protest the bill, arguing that tax cuts would be a prelude to spending cuts — including reduced spending on federal health insurance programs. Headed back to California, he found himself on the same flight as Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and he urged the senator to “Be a Hero” by opposing the cuts. A video of their conversation went viral.

Barkan capitalized adeptly on that celebrity. Seeking to punish Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, for supporting the legislation, he hit on the idea of funding her “future opponent” in 2020, whoever that may be. So far, he has raised almost $3.8 million. During the midterm elections in 2018, he went on a nationwide tour, speaking before thousands even as he was losing the ability to speak.

“I’m willing to give my last breath to save our democracy,” he told the crowds. “What are you willing to give?” He also raised money and starred in television ads telling the story of his illness and attacking Republicans who had voted for the tax cuts.

He has traveled repeatedly to Washington for protests even as he has lost the ability to move his arms and legs. In September 2018, he was arrested at a protest against the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh. The police let him roll into custody.

His activism has allowed him to find some meaning in his illness. “The work of democracy is about trying to do together what we cannot do individually,” he told me. “And so for me the best way to escape my disintegrating body is to engage in this collective struggle.”

“I’m not going to have a 30-year career. I have to jam it all into a couple years right now.”

The power of this performance derives precisely from the fact that it is a limited run. Each visit to Washington is more difficult than the last. Barkan’s most recent trip marked the first time he has formally testified before Congress — but it came after he has lost the ability to speak. He now communicates by using his eyes to pick out letters on a screen, instructing a computerized voice to express the thoughts of Ady Barkan. He has also written a book about his life and beliefs, which will be published in September — one more chance to tell his story.

On Tuesday, the computer delivered Barkan’s opening statement to a House committee. The voice doesn’t sound like his. It lacks the undercurrent of laughter, even in the face of adversity. But it carried his message: He said he has been lucky, blessed with the resources necessary to provide for his own care. But others, he said, are less lucky. They, too, are dying and they need the rest of us — which is to say, the government — to help.

Barkan sat quietly as the voice spoke, wearing a black T-shirt that read “Be a Hero” — an extraordinary person no longer able to do the most ordinary things, seeking through his words and his example to convince ordinary people to do something extraordinary.

“I sit before you today a hopeful man,” he said. “There is a better way to structure our society, a better way to care for one another, a better way to use our precious time together.”

Ady Barkan rolled into Washington this week in a motorized wheelchair, unable to talk or to chew food or to lift his arm to scratch an itch, but determined to deliver the message that health care is a human right.

Dying is no reason to stop fighting

Yes, they said, it was regrettable that the company employed slaves and prisoners of war in its chemical factories, but that was the nature of business during the war years.

This weekend the Reimann family decided to change its tune, offering an abject apology for the behavior of Albert Reimann Jr., who died in 1984, and Albert Reimann Sr., who died in 1954.

“They belonged in jail,” a family spokesman told the German newspaper Bild.

The current generation of Reimanns deserves credit for this striking apology. It cannot be easy to publicly condemn a father and a grandfather. Yet the timing of the apology, more than 70 years after the crimes in question — and long after most of the victims would have been able to hear it — raises hard questions about Germany’s failure to hold corporations accountable for wartime crimes, and about the nature of corporate accountability for past misconduct.

The Reimanns, father and son, ran the chemical company now known as Reckitt Benckiser, or RB, probably most familiar to Americans as the maker of Lysol. New research, based in part on materials that have been in the family’s possession for decades, shows the two men joined the Nazi Party in 1931, when it was still a fringe movement. They donated to the party and displayed its banner outside their factory. “We are a purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old,” the younger Reimann wrote in a letter to Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS. “The owners are unconditional followers of the race theory.”

During the war years, the business prospered — in part because a third of the workforce was employed involuntarily.

The current generation of Reimanns comprises nine people adopted as children by Albert Reimann Jr. Four of those siblings are the principal owners of the family business.

A spokesman for the Reimann family says the siblings decided to hire an expert to study the family’s history after looking at old documents and growing uncomfortable with the long-standing narrative that their grandfather was an unenthusiastic Nazi.

“We were speechless,” the spokesman, Peter Harf, said of the family’s first reaction to the historian’s presentation. “We were ashamed, and were white as a wall.”

The public apology also is good for business. The Reimanns have been on a buying spree, snapping up familiar food and drink brands, including Keurig Green Mountain coffee, Dr Pepper, Snapple, Caribou Coffee, Panera Bread, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and bagel chains Einstein Bros., Noah’s and Bruegger’s. When the Reimanns’ holding company acquired British sandwich maker Pret A Manger last year, the sister of the company’s deceased founder, who happened to be Jewish, declared she was mortified to learn about the Reimanns’ roots.

That’s not the kind of publicity businesses that sell consumer goods tend to enjoy.

Most big German companies offered reckonings and apologies for their wartime conduct in the 1990s. Jonathan Wiesen, a professor of history at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of a book about German corporations and the legacy of the war, says the end of the Cold War eased fears about the consequences of subjecting capitalist institutions to critical scrutiny. It also didn’t hurt that many of the companies were coming under the leadership of a new generation of executives, born after the war. A pattern took hold: Companies threw open their archives, often commissioning a historian to write a report; they apologized for the ensuing revelations; and they offered some money as a gesture of apology.

More than 6,000 companies contributed to a reparations fund for forced laborers established by the German government in 2000, including Reckitt Benckiser. But the government said explicitly that contributions were not confessions of guilt. The most prominent companies, like Volkswagen and Bayer, could not avoid public reckonings. But an untold number of other German companies, some quite large, never apologized for wartime crimes.

In some ways, it is already too late for apologies or compensation. But there is still great value in requiring companies to reckon with the past. The value of a corporation lies precisely in its responsibility for its own history. A corporation maintains ownership of assets even as ownership of the corporation changes hands. It maintains ownership of its liabilities, too.

Some American cities, notably Los Angeles and Chicago, have laws requiring companies that seek to do public business first to declare whether they profited from slavery.

For many people, Oskar Schindler remains the face of German business during the war years. The reality, however, is that there were many more businessmen like the Reimanns. Requiring German companies to document their histories could help to preserve that knowledge, which is particularly important as the last survivors of that era fade away.

This article originally appeared in <a id="5b306428-093c-4566-8b9a-5a9fe3d05d5f" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/opinion/bagels-war-crimes-nazi-reimann.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer): The heirs of Albert Reimann Jr., who built one of Germany’s largest business empires, maintained for decades that Reimann and his father had been reluctant Nazis during World War II.

Bagels and war crimes

He threatened to fire Chairman Jerome Powell. He invited Powell to dinner. None of it worked as well as he would like. In the president’s view, high interest rates still are smothering economic growth.

So on Friday, Trump tried something new. He said that he planned to nominate one of his economic advisers, Stephen Moore, to an open seat on the Fed’s board of governors.

Notwithstanding his public outbursts, Trump previously has nominated six people to the Fed’s board, and all were well-qualified candidates who might have been chosen by any Republican president. With the choice of Moore, however, Trump crossed a line.

Moore has repeatedly staked out public positions on questions of monetary policy over the last decade. His record is best characterized as inconsistent with any particular set of economic principles, but reliably faithful to the short-term interest of the Republican Party.

During the Obama administration, he warned that the Fed was sowing the seeds of hyperinflation. “Zero interest rates haven’t helped the economy,” Moore told The Washington Post in 2015. Following Trump’s election, Moore executed a quick U-turn. He began to insist that lower interest rates were just what the economy needed. Trump reportedly settled on Moore after he was shown an article Moore co-wrote earlier this month making that case.

Moore has not argued that he changed his mind because he realized he was wrong, or because the facts changed. Indeed, on another question of public policy, he has maintained a politically convenient position despite the accumulation of facts to the contrary. He is a stalwart evangelist for the unsupported belief that tax cuts cure slow growth.

The state of Kansas took Moore’s advice on fiscal policy in 2013, adopting a set of tax cuts recommended by Moore and his longtime collaborator Arthur Laffer. The two men promised a “near immediate” increase in economic growth. Instead, the state’s economy languished and the state government fell into a funding crisis. In the course of the subsequent debate, the editorial page editor of The Kansas City Star announced that Moore had misstated so many facts that she would no longer publish his contributions in the paper.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about the level of interest rates. Many economists, both liberals and conservatives, shared Trump’s concerns about the Fed’s move toward higher rates last year. The Fed itself has decided to suspend further rate increases.

But that is no reason to let Trump install a loyalist at the Fed. The public interest is best served by appointing thoughtful and experienced policymakers to the Fed’s board, and then standing back and letting them do their best. Politicians, always looking to the next election, tend to want faster economic growth in the near term without particular regard for the long-term consequences. Trump reportedly has dismissed concerns about the rise of the federal debt, for example, by telling advisers, “Yeah, but I won’t be here.”

The Fed’s job is to keep its eye on the horizon and maintain sustainable economic growth.

Moore is not the man for that job.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b5dadd5b-5be3-47cc-bd8c-679be0a961bf" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/opinion/stephen-moore-federal-reserve-trump.html">The New York Times</a>.

Stephen Moore would be a loyalist, not an expert, at the Fed

(Editorial Observer): President Donald Trump, who craves low interest rates, has tried to bend the Federal Reserve to his will by tweeting insults and offering unsolicited advice.

<h1>America’s most profitable export product is not oil or medicine or Hollywood movies or Boeing airplanes. It is a small green piece of paper with Benjamin Franklin on the front.</h1>

Last year, the United States exported $65.3 billion of its currency — mostly $100 bills.

The world needs an international currency, and the dollar is the obvious candidate because the United States, for all its economic troubles, remains the hub of the global economy. U.S. government debt is the world’s most popular investment, and the bonds can be purchased only with dollars. Oil is the world’s dominant trade good, and it also is priced and sold in dollars. Much like Facebook, everybody uses dollars because everybody uses dollars.

The popularity of paper dollars, however, requires a little more explanation. Most modern money is notional: Wealth is stored on computers; payments are made electronically.

I cannot remember the last time I owned or even held a $100 bill.

Yet foreign demand for the bills known as Benjamins has surged even as the domestic use of dollars has declined. The number of $100 bills in circulation roughly doubled between 2008 and 2017, and experts estimate a vast majority are in foreign hands.

Remarkably, the Federal Reserve recently reported that at the end of 2017, the number of $100 bills in circulation exceeded the number of $1 bills for the first time.

The available evidence suggests large numbers of $100 bills are stuffed in mattresses or other hiding places — particularly in nations where people lack confidence in the value of the domestic currency, or the integrity of the financial system, or the safety of private property. Dollars are hoarded like diamonds, except dollars are easier to spend.

Even America’s enemies hoard American money: U.S. soldiers searching one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces in 2003 found about $650 million in fresh $100 bills.

The $100 bill is the preferred currency for illegal transactions: gambling, drug deals, sales of weapons. The economist Barry Eichengreen, the nearest thing to a biographer of the dollar, has noted that movie villains usually demand payment in greenbacks.

There is obvious efficiency in using large denominations for the types of transactions where payment must be delivered in a suitcase. But the 200 euro note, considerably more valuable than the $100 bill, remains the least common euro note. Criminals want dollars.

Still, it is not clear why demand has doubled. The collapse of the Soviet Union drove a surge in demand for U.S. currency in the 1990s. Nothing comparable has happened recently. And the dollar would appear to face growing competition from the euro, the currency of a region with a larger total economic output than the United States, and the yuan, the currency of a country whose economy is on pace to soon surpass the United States’.

Some experts predict the dollar’s days of dominance are numbered. But experts have been making that prediction for half a century. Meanwhile, the United States continues to crank the printing presses at its plants in Washington and Fort Worth, Texas, and to distribute dollars from licensed warehouses in financial centers including London, Frankfurt, Germany, and Singapore.

Printing dollars, after all, is a very profitable business. Ranked by value, greenbacks finished second on the list of America’s most valuable export products, just behind refined petroleum. But exporting money is much more profitable. It costs the federal government around 14 cents to produce a $100 bill, and a few more cents to send it overseas.

In exchange for each of those bills, the United States gets an interest-free loan of $100. At the end of 2018, foreign holdings of American currency totaled $773.9 billion.

Demand for American currency hones a double-edged sword. By driving up the exchange value of the dollar, it allows Americans to buy foreign goods and services more cheaply. But that makes American exports more expensive for foreign buyers.

So far, it is a trade the United States remains more than happy to make.

This article originally appeared in <a id="66cdad01-b426-44e9-81a9-79d178e469d1" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/opinion/sunday/money-dollar-100.html">The New York Times</a>.

Last year, the United States exported $65.3 billion of its currency — mostly $100 bills.

America's most profitable export: Money

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