Imagine 130M Washing Machines

This is a weird one. I don't think the problem with rich people is that they consume luxury goods. That's actually a good thing overall. Let them have their megayachts, megacars, golden toilets, etc. Someone has to build those.

I think the problem is when they use their unlimited funds to purchase stuff they shouldn't own. Newspapers, TV stations, social media, etc. That kind of power, often flaunted openly (see the bezos scandal when they literally wrote something along the lines of "if you screw with us we have wapo at our disposal") is not something that should be in the hands of one person. Or a family. That's way way way more dangerous to society than them snorting caviar off of models' bodies, or eat gold leaf you won't believe they're not burgers with truffles on top.

If people had their rents cut in half, it would solve most other money problems they complain about (shy of those who will just inflate their lives into being money constrained again).

Of course this will come mostly at the expense of regular middle-class homeowners, who will see the enormous paper gains of their properties in the last 5-10 years be decimated. Red or Blue, I don't care who, hates losing money and will emphatically vote against this happening.

The rest of the article has some easy to read anecdotes, but it's hard to know if they are at relevant/accurate. E.g. common mistake (arguably) that I see a lot:

> In 1990, America enacted a tax on luxury consumption of goods such as expensive cars, yachts, furs and jewelry. A few years later, the tax was repealed by a coalition that included Democratic politicians worried about job loss in the yacht building industry. It’s hard to think of a more perfect example of muddled thinking about distribution. Any tax reform that fails to reduce luxury consumption by the rich will completely fail to reduce economic inequality.

Mega-yachts are money pits. A rich person purchasing a mega-yacht is probably the fastest way to redistribute a monetary supply. Taxing it has some benefit, but reduces the incentive to buy mega-yacht... Now, monetary supply and productivity/wealth are not exactly the same thing, but this seems like a basic error.

The author recognizes that laundromats exist, but doesn't believe that washing machines are a luxury good (his yacht example of 60% owned by the top 1% likely applies somewhere around 60% to the top 30%). This indicates the author generalizes that high density living with shared appliances don't exist or apply to a large part of the population (that density doesn't shift statistics).

A few thoughts, instead of taking 340m people, you need to account for 2% homelessness, another 8% as housing insecure, 30%+ as high density possibly sharing at the apartment/condo building or laundromat level. A small upper 1% that outsource to services.

The infamous Mitt Romney, 47% of Americans don't pay income tax quote can be really shocking when you start thinking about the average American, and the wages that they earn compared to a higher income segment you might be in.

While this is essentially tautological, I'm not sure you can practically tax the majority of luxury consumption. Think of all the small differences when a CEO shows up to work vs a temp worker (or even a middle-manager)[1]. All of those differences are luxuries, and many of them are informal and thus hard to tax. If we were to successfully tax all the formal luxuries (which in and of itself becomes legislative whack-a-mole), the wealthy will have a strong incentive to shift much of their luxury consumption to informal luxuries.

Plus, I find all of the focusing on "wealth tax" and "luxury tax" and such rather mystifying when we have an extremely regressive income tax in the US. The low tax rate for long-term unearned income in the US, combined with the fact that borrowing against assets does not realize any of the gains, makes effective tax rates for the 99.9 percentile much lower than the 90th percentile.

It is possible to eliminate dynastic wealth just by ensuring the losses due to inflation and taxes exceeds investment returns at the top tax bracket.

1: Or the difference in your kid applying to a college with your name on one of the buildings versus someone else's kid applying to that school

Building and deploying that automation requires capital. As a result, it's largely the people who control that capital who benefit from it, not the individual workers whose productivity is increased by it.

There were people who added value to a manufacturing process by being highly skilled welders (earning $30/hr) who can push MIG wire at 30 inches per minute. On a good day, they actually average 20 inches per minute OEE because they also need to load and unload the fixture, take lunch breaks, and so on. Those welders become (or are replaced by) weld-jig-operators, who can load a buffer of incoming parts, unload a buffer of completed parts, and replace emptied spools of wire, clean up the work area, and so on, while the $400k weld cell with a trio of ArcMate robots pushes 80 inches of wire per minute.

Yes, that's a 4x productivity gain, but does the welder now earn $120 hour? No, the new operator now gets a pay cut back to $20/hr because you can train a replacement in a week (unlike a welder, who needs years of practice to manipulate a torch that skillfully). Meanwhile, the owner of the company profits at ~$100/hr, recoups their big capital investment after a year, and rakes in the profits after that to buy another yacht, or maybe a newspaper.

Which could still land you squarely on the economic right.

Nah, that's the wrong way to go about it. The total length of your blood vessels would also circle the earth twice, but I'm sure you'd prefer them to stay safely inside your body.

If each washer is 3 feet on a side, that's 6 square feet. You could easily stack them 4 high with an ordinary forklift. So that's around 7 square miles, or just 7 sections of a standard 36 section survey township. Where I live, there's enough farmland to fit all of them within a 2 mile radius, without disrupting much (well, unless you're a farmer). You'd nearly be able to fit all the dryers too.

The author entirely overlooks that NYC and Chicago are not in earthquake-prone areas and LA is right next to a major geologic fault system. Yes, skyscrapers can be safely built to withstand earthquakes, but it tends to be at least expensive, which is counter to solving affordability issues.

>>I favor a steeply progressive consumption tax.

This is generally pointing in the right direction, but a progressive transaction tax on every transaction, including finance and investments would be far better. Easier to track, harder to evade, far less intrusive into peoples' lives required by income tax. and the rate and difference between rates would be so low that structuring deals to 'optimize' taxation brackets would be pointless.

Just the volume of Equities + TRACE fixed income/structured + munis + real estate is over $200Trillion. A mere 3% tax on those would put the $6T US budget in large surplus. Add $1.7 Quadrillion of ovrerall payments and a 0.3% tax on transactions (yes, $3 per $1000) would also put the US budget in surplus. Make it progressive by setting tax rate tables based on transaction size, e.g., transaction <$10=0.01, <$100=0.1%, <$10k=0.2%, <$100k=0.3%, <$1MM=0.4%, =>$1MM=0.5% (plus big penalties for 'structuring' transactions to lower brackets).

Not impressed with the article

So instead, imagine billions of laptops (or phones) available in store that have local LLMs installed which allows you to have intelligence-like chatbot features available with the equivalent performance of Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT-5 if not better and they are far smaller.

Thank you for telling us that efficient + performant multi-modal local AI models is the endgame; a bonus if they are smaller to fit in phones.

Or perhaps America is poorer because they lack an outside space to hang clothes?

Now imagine the amount of paperclips AI could make.

Then it misses the other big deal, which is the utter weirdness caused by extreme on-paper wealth inequality, where the e.g. Elon Musk numbers reach levels of literal absurdity.

Money, in a sense, doesn't matter. It's "goods and services." The big question should be, does the way we do "money" effectively help everyone trade goods and services in a reasonable way. That's the only real path to "happiness."

Sumner is somehow unfamiliar with the concept of a landlord or vacant property investment.

> progressive consumption taxes

When someone proposes one, let me know.

This is false. Most rich people don't want to get away from every single human. (if they did they can find plenty of places to backpack). They want to get away from a few crazy people who stalk them.