Have the Rich Always Laughed Stiff Tax Rates Away?

The guardians of our conventional wisdom on taxing the rich have messed up — and they know it. They slacked off. They started believing their own tripe. Average Americans, they assumed, would never ever smile on proposals to raise tax rates on the richest among us. After all, the conventional wisdom maintains, those average folks figure that someday they’ll be rich, too.

But now, with tax-the-rich proposals proliferating and polling spectacularly well, the keepers of our bless-the-rich faith are panicking. Their old rhetorical zingers no longer zing.

Higher taxes on the rich as a “penalty on success”? Average Americans today don’t see “success” when they gaze up at America’s top 0.1 percent and see a 343 percent increase in earnings, after inflation, over the past four decades. They see monopoly and outsourcing and insider trading.

Some fans of grand fortune see an opportunity amid this cynicism. They’re realizing that riffing off this cynicism may be the only way to keep taxes on rich people low. Raising tax rates on the wealthy may seem reasonable, their argument goes, but high tax rates on the rich can never actually work out as intended. The rich and their paid help — their accountants and lobbyists — can always end run them.

So disregard those high tax rates on the rich in effect back in the middle of the 20th century, the argument continues. Those top rates — 91 percent in the 1950s and into the 1960s, then 70 percent through the 1970s — never made much of a difference on how much the wealthy had in their wallets.

“The overall trend is unmistakable,” pronounced John Carlson, the cofounder of the right-wing Washington Policy Center, earlier this month. “When rates were much higher, the wealthy sheltered their money and paid a smaller share of the nation’s tax bill.”

In other words, seriously taxing the rich will always be impossible. So why bother even trying?

Posted In: Allied Approaches