philiptrammell.substack.com/p/capital-in-the-22nd-century?utm_source=substack&ut...

This sentence mislabels the U.S. income Gini.

• The article cites FRED series SIPOVGINIUSA, which FRED describes simply as the World Bank GINI Index for the United States; the series notes do not describe it as a “before redistribution” measure.
• For high-income countries, the World Bank’s inequality data are mostly drawn from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). LIS’s own methodology says that all Key Figures use disposable household income, i.e. income after taxes and transfers, not pre-redistribution income.
• By contrast, the U.S. Census Bureau’s official pretax concept is money income, which it defines as income received before payments for taxes and not including noncash benefits. In its latest report, the Census Bureau says the 2024 Gini index on that pretax measure was 0.488, not 0.42.

So the numeric claim is incorrect as stated: a current U.S. before-redistribution/pretax Gini is not 0.42.

This names the statute incorrectly. The IRS’s official name is the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). The article uses the wrong acronym: FACTA.

This overstates FATCA’s scope.

The IRS explains that FATCA requires certain foreign financial institutions and entities to report U.S. account holders or be subject to withholding on withholdable payments. That is narrower than “all payments from the US.”

So the article is incorrect to describe FATCA as imposing a blanket 30% charge on all U.S.-source payments.