As for the right, taxes on capital gains and other unearned income should be at the earned income rate.
Now that I've pissed off everyone...
From the Washington Post's Wonkblog:
Lord Grantham may think he can take arms against the slings and arrows of 1920s Britain that threaten Downton Abbey and its outrageous fortune, but he faces a mighty adversary: the immutable laws of economics.
When Mrs. Patmore tussles with the new mixer, or Grantham frets over “death taxes,” or “poor Molesley” loses his post and resorts to patching up the pavement, Downton Abbey is paying homage to economic forces that transcend early 20th-century Britain and apply just as neatly to the 21st-century world.
Downton’s soap opera characters are wrestling not only with their emotions, but also with basic Downtonomics: the threat and promise of technological change, burden of inheritance taxes, foreign investment, danger of speculation, need for retirement planning, virtue of investing for growth, and inadequacies of the social safety net. Is the cook, Mrs. Patmore, any less adept with that mixer than your grandmother is with a tablet?
A primer in Downtonomics:
1) New technology demands adaptation — and not everyone can manage it
Take the lowly mixer. It arrives in a modest brown box labeled “mixer-beater,” with its shiny metal body and a pair of mixing heads. Ivy and Daisy are fascinated.
Mrs. Patmore, left, wasn’t the only one in post-World War I Britain struggling with new machinery. (Nick Briggs/PBS)
Patmore “sees this as the kiss of death, the nail in the coffin,” as Lesley Nicol, the actress who plays her, says in the online special feature. The electric mixer will make it easier and faster to prepare food. And while bottom-rung scullery maids Ivy and Daisy adapt easily to the new gadget, as young people often do, Patmore can’t quite master it; she breaks a bowl while trying to use it, declaring that she “must have put those rotty prongs in wrong.”
The mixer is only the beginning. Patmore is slow to adapt to a new sewing machine and refrigerator, which she is told will help reduce costly waste. Lady Grantham asks the reluctant Patmore, “isn’t there any aspect of the present day you can accept without resistance?” And Patmore says of Lady Grantham, “nothing can stop her from dragging us into the new age.”
Patmore wasn’t the only one in post-World War I Britain struggling with new machinery. The Great War had helped propel technological change as the country imported machine tools from the United States to help meet war needs. University of California at Berkeley professor Barry Eichengreen (whose wife is a fan of the show) wrote that Britain at the time “took a first tentative step down the road that led to modern mass production à la the United States.”
Will Patmore find her way down that road?
2) Workers who don’t adapt slide down the economic ladder
Mr. Carson, Downton’s senior butler, offers Mr. Molesley a job as footman, a position demanding fewer skills and offering less money.
Mr. Carson, Downton’s senior butler, offers Mr. Molesley a job as footman, a position demanding fewer skills and offering less money. (Joss Barratt/PBS)
Molesley was trained as a butler, and a butler was a skilled position in those days, requiring someone who knew how to manage the staff. When Matthew Crawley died, however, Molesley lost his position as a valet and couldn’t find another until the house’s senior butler, Mr. Carson, offered him a job as footman, a position demanding fewer skills and offering less money.
“I have come down in the world, Mr. Carson,” Molesley says. “I am a beggar and so, as the proverb tells us, I cannot be a chooser.”
“I see Molesley as the 1920s counterpart of the contemporary highly skilled worker in manufacturing — left behind by changed circumstances,” says Eric S. Maskin, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who teaches at Harvard University. Today’s Molesley might be a former printing press machinist now restocking shelves at Wal-Mart.
3) Estate, or inheritance, taxes can be useful
Patmore’s battle pales in importance next to the overarching theme of the show: the crushing tax burden that threatens Downton and forces Lord Grantham to consider extreme measures to save it. Most Americans call them estate or inheritance taxes, but like today’s critics of the tax, Grantham calls them “death taxes.”
Taxes threaten Downton and force Lord Grantham to consider extreme measures to save the estate. (Highclere Castle/PBS)
His wife, Cora, an adaptable American, is philosophical. “The world has changed. A lot of people live in smaller houses than they used to,”...MORE
