Another Stupidity

From a usually smart guy.

Remember too that when you have a progressive tax system, especially when there are surcharges on people making seven-figure incomes, you also have a system where for any given level of national income, the greater the inequality, the greater the government’s tax revenues. And indeed federal revenues have been rising faster than median wages for decades now, thanks to the rich getting ever richer.

Given the government’s insatiable appetite for cash, it’s only natural that it would prefer to tax plutocrats, spending some of that money on poorer Americans, rather than move to a world where poorer Americans earn more (but still don’t pay that much in taxes), and the plutocrats earn less, depriving the national fisc of untold billions in revenue.

This idea is so dumb that it succumbs to the most casual applications of logic or history. Progressive taxes are not good for plutocrats, which is why they always fight them, and why they got poorer when we had them, and why they are so rich since Reagan nearly abolished them. Naturally it was picked up by Andrew Sullivan and Tyler Cowen, two guys who are stupid only when they smoke to0 much wingnut crack - or about once per day.

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