There is No Alternative - Taxing the Rich Edition

So, here's the thing: The cat's out of the bag - the 1% in this country have laid claim to more than three decades of steady growth and now have an obscene amount of the nation's wealth. One offshoot of this grave injustice is that the elite and their lackeys have to spend a huge amount of time trying to convince everyone there is no alternative. They don't usually defend the arrangement itself (you're envious for even thinking about that), but rather focus on policy proposals that would threaten the status quo.

So here's waterboy Adam Davidson making a claim you hear from right-wing shills all the time: Namely, you can't just tax the rich because it won't raise enough revenue. According to these defenders of the rich and powerful, in order to raise the money necessary to pay for the 1% ruining the economy and still taking massive bonuses, we must tax the middle class. This is the usual posture by defenders of the status quo: We must gut entitlements, we must tax the middle class, we must, we must, we must - there's just no alternative. It's total and complete bullshit, of course (that unfortunately appears in prestigious publications). But it's bullshit that protects the elite and therefore, continues to appear no matter how many times it's refuted. So, here's Dean Baker (who I just interviewed) on whack-a-mole duty:

Adam Davidson has a piece in the NYT magazine about how the middle class will have to take a hit to deal with the country’s deficit. It’s a bit quick to reach this conclusion.

First, the piece too quickly dismisses the possibility of getting substantial additional tax revenue from the wealthy. It presents the income share for those earning more than $1 million as $700 billion, saying that if we increase the tax rate on this group by 10 percentage points (from roughly 30 percent to 40 percent), then this yields just $70 billion a year.

However, if we lower our bar slightly and look to the top 1 percent of households, with adjusted gross incomes of more than $400,000, and update the data to 2012 (from 2009), then we get adjusted gross income for this group of more than $1.4 trillion. Increasing the tax take on this group by 10 percentage points nets us $140 billion a year. If the income of the top 1 percent keeps pace with the projected growth of the economy over the decade, this scenario would get us more than $1.7 trillion over the course of the decade, before counting interest savings....

There are also other ways to address much of the shortfall....

In short, there is little reason to be talking about imposing increased burdens on the middle class any time soon.

Well done, Dean. But the larger point I want to make is that you should be suspicious any time you hear "we must," "we can't" or that "there is no alternative." How can it possibly be the case that we *must* slash entitlements when the Koch brothers collectively have more than $50 billion? Until we deal with the appalling wealth disparities such arguments should be rejected out of hand and, even more importantly, called what they are - elitist propaganda.