At Tax Time, Our Emperors Have No Clothes

[marmar]

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:


At Tax Time, Our Emperors Have No Clothes
April 6, 2013

Today’s conventional wisdom in Congress on taxing the rich — that tax rates on income at our economic summit have gone as high as they can sensibly go — has no real evidence to support it.

By Sam Pizzigati


This past January, Congress raised the federal tax rate on joint return income over $450,000 from 35 to 39.6 percent. But the top federal rate, even with this boost, is still running under half the top rate back in America’s Eisenhower years.

What to do? Some Democrats in Congress — the members of the Progressive Caucus — want to raise the nation’s top tax rate still higher, up to 49 percent on annual income over $1 billion.

But no big-time movers and shakers in Washington, from either party, support higher top rates. Republicans typically claim that higher rates would undermine the incentive to work, save, and invest. GOP hard-liners even balk at moves to shut tax loopholes. Any step that hikes tax bills, they hold, invites calamity.

Mainstream Democrats, for their part, generally consider higher tax rates and moves to close tax loopholes an either/or proposition. Instead of raising current top rates, they argue, we should keep top rates modest and apply these modest rates to the “broader tax base” that limiting loopholes would create. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/at-tax-time-our-emperors-have-no-clothes/

[JoeBlowToo]

1. "Mainstream Democrats?" More like Republican Left!

It is amazing how far right this country has been manipulated.

[Fuddnik]

2. The Great Prophet John Mitchell told us that.

And he wasn't warning, he was gloating.