Two good articles in one day!
I believe in the use of government to create opportunity, both now and in the future. To do that, we need to pay our bills, not shift them to future generations. How? As I discuss in my tax policy statement, broaden the base, and increase rates progressively. What I propose is necessary to pay the bills; a second goal is to lessen extremes in inequality so most Americans better off, and we as a society prosper.
An interesting story today discusses this: For Two Economists, the Buffett Rule Is Just a Start:
"Both admire, even adore, the United States, they say, for its entrepreneurial drive, innovative spirit and, not least, its academic excellence: the two met while re-searchers in Cambridge, Mass. But both also express bewilderment over the current conversation about whether the wealthy, who have taken most of America’s income gains over the last 30 years, should be paying higher taxes.
“The United States is getting accustomed to a completely crazy level of inequality,” Mr. Piketty said, with a degree of wonder. “People say that reducing inequality is radical. I think that tolerating the level of inequality the United States tolerates is radical.”
As much as Mr. Piketty’s and Mr. Saez’s work has informed the national debate over earnings and fairness, their proposed corrective remains far outside the bounds of polite political conversation: much, much higher top marginal tax rates on the rich, up to 50 percent, or 70 percent or even 90 percent, from the current top rate of 35 percent."
The evidence shows that higher marginal tax rates simply do not impair either job growth or prosperity. The most prosperous periods in the last 100 years had marginal rates between 50% and 70%, and the distribution of that prosperity was broad based. Laffer simply proposed a theory, and it has been proven wrong over the past 30 years.
We are in the process of creating a plutocracy: an aristocracy of wealth. This is not the American way.