Taxing "Millionaires and Billionaires"

Now that President Obama has actually come out with a proposal for taxing "millionaires and billionaires" we can get a handle of his proposal.  Just how much does he propose to tax those folks who are already at the point where average citizens may ask how much more do they need.

According Carol E. Lee and Janet Hook in the The Wall Street Journal the president's proposal to phase out deductions for those earning more than a taxable income of $250,000 a year expects to collect $400 billion over ten years.

According to the SOI Table 5 (xls) IRS analysis of individual income tax returns, the floor of the top one percent of taxpayers is around $200,000.  It's been going down recently, of course, due to the Great Recession.  In 2007 to 2009 the Feds collected about $400 billion each year from the top one percent.  So the Obama tax increase on millionaires and billionaires, $400 billion over ten years, is going to increase the federal income tax bill on the millionaires and billionaires by about ten percent.  The increase is not nothing, and it's not outrageously punitive.

Problem is, of course, that the millionaires and billionaires in question are exactly the people we are counting on to start hiring at some point in the future when they have got off their capital strike.  So ramping up their taxes can't really help in the jobs department.

Here's what I think.  I think that the Republican House should pass the president's tax increase on millionaires and billionaires.  I think they should say: here Mr. President.  Here is what you want.  Tax the rich.  See how many jobs it creates.

Tax-the-rich is pure left-wing politics.  It's required for lefties because the left has to believe that it is a lack of tax payments from the rich that is keeping the poor poor.  If you don't believe that, and you don't believe that corporations are screwing the workers and the consumers then you don't have a reason to pass swingeing legislation to tax and regulate and crush those evil capitalists and their partners in crime, millionaires and billionaires.

You'd just think that, wow, in the last two hundred years under the reign of the corporations daily income has gone from about $3 to $100 in constant dollars.  Somebody was doing something right.

The truth is that left-wing politics is "living by looting" in exactly the same way as the "barons of the crags" once lived by looting the travelers on the alpine passes.  The problem is, of course, that when you live by looting instead of working to make products and services for other people, it turns you into a monster.  Thus it turns out, according to Peter Schweizer's Makers and Takers,  that liberals are meaner and less honest than conservatives.  Looting for a living does that to you.