A thin and specious argument

Last week Senator Elizabeth Warren was on CNN.

SEN. WARREN: "You know how much [Elon Musk] paid in taxes, one of the richest people in the world? Zero! And he's not the only one. Jeff Bezos, another one of the richest people in the world, he pays less in taxes than a public school teacher or a firefighter." pic.twitter.com/8glWry5lWz

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) February 20, 2022

A quick, rough transcript:

I believe, however, that billionaires ought to be paying taxes, and it shouldn’t simply be optional. You know, what we’ve now seen is both giant corporations and billionaires have enough tricks in the tax code, but part of what happens right now, is that, for example, Elon Musk in 2018, we’ve actually seen his tax returns. 

You know how much he paid in taxes, one of the richest people in the world? Zero. And he’s not the only one. Jeff Bezos, he pays less in taxes than a public school teacher or firefighter.  And they do this because they’re only being taxed on income. They very cleverly make sure they have no official income, they just have all this stock which keeps building in value, building in value and they borrow against it.  It’s just not right.

Her argument is, of course, tissue thin and specious.  Musk pays billions in taxes and it is of course not optional that he do so.  He is compelled by the force of law, just as with the rest of us.  

There is the latitude in the taxing system that he can, with planning, pay different types of taxes, most the wealthy choosing to pay capital gains rather than income taxes.  And of course, the tax system exists via the authorizing authority of the Senate and House of Representatives.  The Senate in which Warren sits as a member of the majority party.  The majority party in the Senate, in the House, and controlling the Executive Branch as well.

The structure of the tax code is entirely within Warren's control (within the constraints of the Constitution) to change as long as she can muster the support to do so.  But the tax code is a complex compromise of nearly infinite competing goals and objectives.  Tug here and it gives there.

But my puzzlement is not with Warren's argument per se.  It is obviously fallacious.  

My puzzlement is with regard to the dynamic which leads to the argument she is making.   Warren is obviously bright and credentially successful.  She is rich from her Harvard professor career and from her legal consulting to major corporations.  

Which makes you wonder.  Why is she advancing such a facially obvious set of falsehoods?

It cannot be ignorance.  She is a Harvard professor for goodness sake.  Unwise they might some of them be but they are not ignorant.  

It cannot be linguistic imprecision and sloppiness of argument construction.  She's a lawyer for goodness sake.  She knows exactly what she is saying and the argument she is making.

Is she dumbing down a complex argument and in doing so ending up making it factually incoherent?  Theoretically possible but I doubt it.  Again, she is a professor, someone who must be accustomed to pitching the right level of argument to the targeted audience.

Is she deliberately choosing to lie?  Again, I kind of doubt it, but perhaps.  On the one hand, all you have as a professional is your reputation which rests not only on capability but on integrity.  It seems impossible she would choose to tell obvious lies for the negative affect it would have on her reputation.  On the other hand, she seems to reside in circles that might be characterized as epistemically fact-free zones.  Is it an untruth if everyone around you believes the argument anyway?

Is it ideological conviction?  Maybe the best explanation.  But the strong counter-argument is that she is bright.  We are all blind to some of our faults and misperceptions but it wouldn't seem that she could be that blind.  But perhaps.

The most likely explanation is that her argument is the product of multiple deficits.  She has an integrity deficit as exemplified by her early-career effort to game the racial affirmative action system by claiming non-existent Native American heritage.  She has a capability deficit as exemplified by the flawed health bankruptcy research she did which helped establish her as an academic star on the academic left despite how flawed the research was.  She certainly exists in an epistemic and ideological bubble.

I am guessing that all these factors together (along with some dashes of ignorance, some imprecision, some oversimplification) lead her to this painfully wrong argument she is making.  

Which goes to a larger issue.  Why does she even have stature anymore?  She has been making bad arguments her entire career, almost all of which end up being demonstratively wrong.  She is articulate and persuasive, but eventually we learn to recognize con men with the easy patter for what they are.

Why do we remain blind to these public intellectual charlatans for so long?

I suppose it is the co-dependency of academia and mainstream media but that doesn't sound like it is a sufficient argument.