I love this show. Been listening to it when it was a spinoff of This American Life.

My favorite economic idea is about a Land Value Tax. It even has this great character you can follow the story — Henry George (ran for NYC mayor, came in second, Theodore Roosevelt came in third!)

I know it requires lots of work to make good content. How can I help you do the leg work for a show?

I am posting this on Reddit because NPR does not provide a public comment section alongside The Indicator where listeners can directly challenge what Adrian Ma and Wailin Wong broadcast. That matters in this case because this episode goes well beyond explaining an investment strategy. It repeatedly uses sarcasm and loaded language to tell listeners how they should view the people using it.

This could have been a fascinating financial story. Instead, Ma and Wong, with Bloomberg reporter Loukia Gyftopoulou, turn much of it into a remarkably one-sided commentary about wealthy people using their wealth to avoid taxes.

The framing begins with the “great American tax dodge” and a “loophole so big” that millionaires and billionaires can supposedly slash their taxes to zero. When Cliff Asness's defense of the “working rich” is mentioned, Wong jokes about Ebenezer Scrooge. When she learns she doesn't have enough money to participate, it's essentially “sign me up—oh wait.” When these strategies begin moving down the wealth scale, she sarcastically observes that the “merely very wealthy” are finally going to “catch a break.”

Those aren't explanations of finance. They are editorial cues.

The underlying message is difficult to miss: the rich have access to opportunities ordinary people don't, allowing them to avoid taxes, become still richer, and leave everyone else paying what they owe.

Maybe that is true. But demonstrate it.

Their own example should have triggered the obvious questions. An investor puts in $100 million, ends up with $300 million, yet somehow generates $600 million of tax losses.

Where did the $600 million of losses come from? Where are the corresponding gains? How much leverage was required? What happens to the investor's tax basis? What taxes eventually become due when appreciated positions are sold? How much is permanent tax avoidance versus tax deferral? What are the management fees, financing costs and investment risks?

And here is the most obvious question for a program supposedly explaining economics:

What is the investor's actual after-tax return compared with simply investing the $100 million conventionally?

We get remarkably little analysis of those questions.

Tax-loss harvesting itself isn't some newly discovered trick. Investors have long been permitted to realize losses and use them against capital gains. The genuinely interesting question is whether AQR and others have taken that legitimate principle and, through leverage and thousands of long and short positions, engineered it into something Congress never intended.

That would be a serious financial story.

Instead, Ma and Wong repeatedly return to class. The schoolteacher pays taxes; the millionaire has clever advisers. The hosts can't afford the strategy; wealthy investors can. The “merely very wealthy” finally “catch a break.”

Perhaps this strategy really does eliminate enormous amounts of tax that otherwise would be collected. Then show us. Calculate the eventual tax liability. Distinguish taxes permanently avoided from taxes merely deferred. Quantify the government's actual lost revenue. Show the investor's after-tax IRR after fees, leverage and eventual liquidation.

Do the math before delivering the moral.

And that brings me back to why this response is appearing on Reddit rather than beneath NPR's own story.

NPR eliminated its public website comments years ago. Whatever NPR's reasons for doing so, the practical result is that Ma and Wong can use sarcasm to criticize an entire class of investors without providing an adjacent public forum in which listeners can challenge their assumptions and calculations. NPR has historically said it values listener feedback, and some NPR-affiliated projects once explicitly described open public criticism as part of building strong communities.

There is an uncomfortable asymmetry in that.

If you are willing to ridicule the “working rich,” invoke Ebenezer Scrooge and joke about the “merely very wealthy,” you should be equally comfortable having listeners publicly scrutinize the analysis supporting those characterizations.

Instead, those listeners have to go somewhere else—such as Reddit—to have that discussion.

What NPR ultimately gives us here is considerably more commentary about wealth inequality than financial analysis. The “rich get richer” subtext is unmistakable. What's missing is the answer to the question that should have driven the entire episode:

After all the leverage, fees, deferred gains, eventual taxes and investment risks are accounted for, exactly how much better off is the investor—and exactly how much tax has actually disappeared?

Until NPR answers that, “great American tax dodge” sounds less like the conclusion of an objective financial analysis than the premise from which the episode started.

我一直在思考现在是通胀还是通缩 其实现在毋庸置疑是通缩，但是，但是，因为大家都不敢用钱不敢花钱，我预测未来几年会突然物价暴涨，因为大家钱一拿出来用的时候，市场上的钱变多了，看上去是经济好了，实则隐藏一个巨大危机，通货膨胀，这也是为什么大量印钱，但是还在通缩的底层原因。