What's Really Radical? Not Taxing the Rich

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/03/opinion/democrats-wealth-tax.html

What’s Really Radical? Not Taxing the Rich
It’s time to reverse the extreme upward redistribution of the last 40 years.
By David Leonhardt
Feb. 3, 2019


A house is the biggest asset that most families own. If middle-class families can pay an annual tax on their main source of wealth, wealthy families can, too, says David Leonhardt. Matt Rourke/Associated Press

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Economic output — known as G.D.P. — per person has almost doubled over this period. But the bulk of the bounty has flowed to the very rich. The middle class has received relative crumbs.

If middle-class pay had increased as fast as the economic growth, the average middle-class family would today earn about $15,000 a year more than it does, after taxes and benefits. Instead, that middle-class family effectively forfeits the money to the rich, year after year after year. (Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, first got me thinking about calculations like these.)



The extreme redistribution of income — upward — has multiple causes. Some of them, like technological change, stem mostly from private-sector forces. But government policy plays a crucial role. Tax rates on the wealthy have fallen sharply. Labor unions have been undermined. Big companies have been allowed to grow even bigger and more powerful. The United States has lost its lead as the most educated country in the world.

More often than not over the past 40 years, our government has helped the rich at the expense of everyone else. As a result, economic inequality has reached Gilded Age levels.