The Chris Moeller Archives

Soak 'em

My grandpa was an Iowa farmer back when there was a large number of small family farms in Iowa. Not the small cluster of large corporate ones that exists today. Long retired from the field, and an octogenarian widower at the time, he married a restaurateur from Albert Lea, Minnesota. Shortly after, he read something I had just written in college and told me about a visit he recently had with some of his new wife’s wealthy relatives. A cousin or the like, during what was evidently an inappropriate dinner conversation involving politics and possibly religion cut the thick air by quipping something towards the newcomer in the group that approximated: “What we need in this country are politicians that are good common sense farmers like Elmer Moeller. Elmer, what would you do if you were president?” His wry reply to her, he told me smiling: “The first thing I would do is raise taxes on the rich people.”

Common sense tends to hold majority opinion, and 59% of poll respondents (of The Hill newsletter) that are registered voters say they agree with 29-year-old Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s idea to raise the top marginal tax rate to 70% on income over $10 million per year. In the same poll, even 45% of Republicans say they supported this idea. And these numbers are despite the fact that no Washington politician has explicitly promoted an idea such as this in more than four decades.

A top marginal rate of 70% was the number all the way up until the Reagan presidency dawned in 1981. The rate had plunged to 28% before he left office, and has only slightly come back since—to 37%. As I inferred, this has absolutely not been a political issue in this country until this very moment. Democrats have avoided it like a mud puddle in the middle of the street. In awe of Reagan's charm, each attempted to replicate him and turn the party's focus from wooing working people to the ballot to trying to outdistance Republicans in Wall Street fundraising.

Gallup has been polling on the issue of taxing the rich since the early ‘90s and the support for higher taxes hasn't strayed since then outside the range of 60 to 70% in the data. Only about 10% of people, at any given time, have supported lowering government revenue on millionaires and billionaires. Now that Ocasio is on the march, the gatekeepers of the government-- from the cult of Ayn Rand-- are positively terrified. They’ve gone after the freshman lawmaker for her supposed lack of education (she’s a summa cum laude graduate in economics), her social media presence, her physical appearance, anything that might possibly stop the approaching train of economic sanity. She’s supposedly a counterfeit champion of the working class with a secretly-expensive wardrobe and/or a hidden upper crust upbringing. Her given name-- from her Latina parents-- is Alexandria, but her nickname in high school in the Bronx was the more whitebread... Sandy! Aghast!

More menacing than the personal attacks upon the change agent are the lies and misinformation being spread about the plan itself. Perhaps the first and loudest lie against one of the most consistently popular political ideas in America was that Ocasio is talking about a 70% rate on all income. She is not. The working class and the poor have already been held hostage to a national tax policy that lays an unfair burden upon them. As I said earlier, the 70% rate applies to income after and above the $10 million level. How many of you reading this just fell out of your (tax) bracket? And this is a modest number. In the early '50s, during perhaps the most lively economic era in the nation's history, the rate topped off just above 90%.

Oh my god, how the super-rich hate this. They have urine running down their leg, collectively and figuratively-speaking. At the World Economic Summit in Davos, Switzerland Tuesday, the billionaire class came armed with pillows, blankets, and warm milk. The chief of investments at Guggenheim Partners called it "scary," and said the likelihood of something like this policy coming to fruition was "quite real," although I think he was just trying to reverse-jinx it. The billionaire CEO of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, attempted to label the U.S. "the second most progressive (my italics for emphasis) tax regime in the world." (And don't you just adore his pointed use of the sinister word "regime"?) Some supply-siders are arguing that the plan is doomed to fail because the rich could still find ways, as they do now, to hide their gains and offset their losses, but better, I say, not to concede defeat just because the uber-rich are disreputable and contemptible outlaws. Conservative Democrats in Congress, which still describes most of them and the sum of the party leadership, are doing their familiar dance-- ducking under their walnut desks and telling their executive assistants to tell visitors that they're "in conference," but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doubled down at a birthday tribute Monday to one of the critical forebears of her theories on economics and common sense, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr...

"I do think a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don't have access to public health is wrong." In a follow-up tweet, she posited: "It's wild that some people are more scared of a marginal tax rate than the fact that 40% of Americans struggle to pay for at least one basic need, like food and rent."

posted by CM @ 9:16 AM