$1,000,000 you will be taxed $.70 cents on. If you make a total of $100,000,000 million dollars a year in total compensation that means you will take home $31,000,000. You ain't gonna starve on those kinds of earnings, you'll still be able to buy plenty of homes in Vail and Key West and Greece and the South of France. During the golden ages--Eisenhower--this was the tax rate in the country--actually was higher. We did all right back then, no?

And besides, if Democrats start by arguing 50% the Rpeublicans will whittle them down to say 40% and that just won't cut it--not with the ind of financial crisis we are facing. I'd settle for 60%--maybe even 50%. But the the CLinton era 40% tax rates just weren't high enough.

Besides, I guarantee you, if the US had a health care system like that in say, oh, Denmark, and they didn't have to live in fear of getting sick and losing everything a lot more people would be quite happy taxing the very wealthy at a 70% rate. The peasants aren't looting the castle in Denmark--as a matter of fact, Denmark is rated one of the happiest places on the planet year after year, not too mention that their broadband penetration is the highest on the planet too.

High marginal rates allow for real social investments, not just a military-Keynsianistic expirement we have here in the US.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

the US (and many other countries) had those marginal tax rates. And during those years the rich and powerful did not cease striving, did not stop working hard, etc...

70% won't be hard to sell after the meltdown. Not hard at all. The problem with Americans right now is that they think they're pre-rich. Once they realize they aren't, that these things will never effect them, except by reducing their tax bill and increasing government services for them, they'll go for it.

They sure did after the Great Depression and WWII. In fact marginal tax rates at the top end were often higher than that. This where I disagree with SP, I don't think 70% is enough. I'd probably have that a million, and at 10 million I'd probably kick it to 90%.

be but as a practical selling matter at the present time, 70% would be a good start. But 90% after $10 million? Sure, I'm game for that.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

A multiple of what the legal minimum salary is for a person working 40 hours/week. I'd say, 50 times that is the maximum income. Anything above that goes to the Govt. I think it is hard to live in a society when somebody makes 10,000 what other people make.
But I can live with a 90% tax on incomes over 10M.

used to be run by a rather rapacious, "I got mine" sort. They were called an aristocracy, but over time and political courage the character of Denmark's politics--and Germany's and France's and elsewhere in Europe has changed. That kind of change happens when people see the benefits of government policies. And that's exactly why the Conservatives in this country launched their culture and class war forty years ago: they saw that FDR's and LBJ's reforms were actually providing benefits that people liked. And it terrified them and stirred them to a massive counter-offensive that's been going on ever since. This was the real counter-culture of the 60s and early 70s. All the rest was very, very mainstream and mainstreamed.

Why is it that Germany in the last 20 years has actually added to its industrial capacity, has actually managed to keep industrial jobs and we haven't? Because they have invested and continue to invest in their human capital.

Where are the rich going to go? You think Jack Welch would move to India? Or China? Please! They'll stay here. It's just a threat.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

I will agree that Europe has at times been plagued by something worse than what the US currently has, a true aristocracy, and that at the moment their current system seems to be humming along without some of the major problems of ours... but that doesn't mean their system is optimal (not that I am in any way claiming that ours is).They have plenty of issues of their own. Ours just happen to me manifesting right now.

And as far as the rich moving, no I don't see Jack Welch ever moving. But one of the major problems with American industry right now is our lack of "worldly" business leaders. We are great at selling to ourselves, and did a reasonably good job selling to others when we were the only game in town, but that's not the case anymore. Your young entrepreneur with an engineering degree, an MBA, who speaks a second language and has traveled the world is precisely the guy (or girl) who will have no problem moving elsewhere but was your best hope for building a successful American corporation that was a net exporter.

Before discussing a 70% marginal tax rate, start by ending the Iraq War and start dumping that expense into higher education and fixing it so the rich actually pay the tax rates they are assigned now. First things first.

to you if we started calling for the wealthy to pay for their fair share of the war by calling for high tax rates the war would end in an effing flash.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

If you don't live here or locate your headquarters here, you pay a gross receipts tax on everything you sell here.

until we're no longer the dominant global economy (which seems to be rapidly approaching). Then you lose that leverage entirely, particularly if other countries find themselves in a position to retaliate in a similar manner. Why headquarter in the US to gain cheaper access to a limited market when you could be outside it and sell to the world for less?

The UK seems to survive a VAT quite well. A gross receipts tax is no different. A lower tax based on net income if you're headquartered in the US might make it more attractive to plant roots here.

One thing that I've been harping on with the tax code is the insane depreciation tax schedule employed by the IRS for capital equipment. We really need to do away with it and allow industries to simply expense their capital equipment expenditures.

it'll still be a huge market. People will not just write off the US market unless it's completely unprofitable. And it won't be.

If we're going to compare this current business to the Great Depression (a comparison I "hope" is unfounded, whereas a few weeks ago I was saying I "think" is unfounded):

"The leading industrialized nations responded to the crisis by imposing trade barriers on imports with the hopes of increasing demand for domestically produced goods and to raise revenue from tariffs. "Concerns about low agricultural prices, an influx of imports, rising unemployment, and declining tax revenue generated public sentiment for trade restraints." The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of June 17, 1930 responded by raising tariffs by up to 50% on a wide range of goods. Unfortunately, the resulting fall in imports created unemployment abroad that quickly invoked protectionism in response, creating unemployment back in the US!"

followed by:

"Ironically, even though tariff rates rose by up to 50%, imports declined so sharply that tariff revenues fell 46% from $602 million in 1929 to $328 million in 1932. This not to mention the loss of tax revenue from the domestic unemployment the tariffs caused indirectly."

http://www.shambhala.org/business/goldocean/causdep.html

Long story short, import tariffs on international companies are a form of protectionism that the event we're all looking at as a warning clearly suggests not engaging in.

The gist of my argument is that one doesn't escape taxes by moving out of the country, but one pays their fair share--just as if they were located in the USA.

At any rate, the USA no longer manufactures most of what it consumes.

protectionism and have been predicting it for some time. Tarifs aren't always bad, it depends on how you do them. Odds are pretty good they'll be done stupid, though. But frankly, the US will need to put on currency controls and tariffs in order to rebuild its capacity to produce what it needs once folks won't lend the US money to buy goods.

Why isn't it done?

overlooked and serious problems we face. I just finished reading Scott Horton's amazingly chilling piece about the Justice Department in this month's Harpers. Here's the thing, however, I'm not a lawyer and as much as I scream and moan and complain and howl about legal issues no one would ever listen to me, other than to take a deeply moral stance on it and being the flawed human that I am, some would say irredeemably so, no one would listen either. But it quite possibly is the the key issue we face. And I don't think Hillary or Obama quite understand the seriousness of how fouled our rule of law ethos is.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

I will totally agree with. Not that you're flawed, but that the rule of law is suffering... you know what I meant. :^P

i appreciate this comment. -and i was *about* to add i thought it still a good idea and proper that you go ahead and you express your views on our legal major disaster, caveat and all, when i considered you may already have... and that a search through your past posts would be a good idea in general for me and beneficial. i really appreciated this, especially the last on clinton and obama. thanks.

He is a professor of constitutional law.

that *did* bear repeating in my case.and i wonder why.
he should hammering that point like crazy.

go hand in glove, inextricably linked.

^{“Is not our first thought to go on the road? The road is our source, our vault of treasures, our wealth. Only on the road does the ‘traveller’ feel like himself, at home.”
Ryszard Kapuscinski}

Agreed entirely. It's very easy to vote for spending that isn't coming out of *your* pocket. When the bill for the Iraq war comes due, the very rich know that it won't be them who'll be paying for it, even though among their number are those who profited disproportionately from it, so why care?

An effective taxation rate makes it their problem too -- and it's curious how it leads to more sensible policies about what should be done with that money.

Of course, we need to both raise taxes and reduce excessive spending. However, the question is one of policy.

Policy is based on a vision of what the country is and where it is going. Right now that vision is badly skewed, and raising taxes or cutting spending without changing the vision is almost pointless. Problems will arise, the Right will claim that it's the Left's fault, and they will be reelected to another round of pillaging, as they did when Clinton cleaned up after Reagan/Bush 41.

The underlying premise of US policy is based on feeding the military-corporatist-governmental apparatus. Military spending is essentially an enormous transfer of wealth to this apparatus. Raising taxes to support this is folly, in that this skimming of wealth is inflationary and results in a false notion of growth.

Disaster capitalism is not only using crises, real or manufactured, to advance economic liberalism and neo-imperialism. The entire US policy has been based on disaster capitalism since the Nixon era. The strategy has been to keep the country in constant fear of a bogeyman in order to make excessive military spending a permanent feature of US policy. That has to change or nothing else will work. The game was almost up with glastnost, but 9/11 provided a new bogeyman that the Right has flogged in the name of Islamofascism.

Similarly, Big Oil has maneuvered the US into dependence on petro-based energy, even though it is causing the US to hemorrhage dollars, putting enormous pressure on the balance of payments account. Unless the US reverses this policy quickly, this hemorrhaging will continue and the dollar will continue to tank.

A corollary of this policy is increasing national debt and the expense of servicing it. Congress is not in the process of upping the debt limit to over 10T, and interest rates are definitely going to be heading up as the dollar tanks.

We need to address these issues immediately, before even contemplating raising taxes going into a depression.

When taxes are raised, we also need to rethink how this should be done. Taxing business is not a good policy in my view, since business simply passes this along as another expense, and it gets in the way of global competitiveness. Business should not be paying for anything but doing business, and business related expenses, e.g., road fees for trucks, etc. Business should not be responsible for benefits such as medical insurance that are not directly related to business, such as OHSA. These are all areas of social welfare that the people themselves should be funding through the commons, e.g., universal health care, SS, safety net, etc.

Taxation should not be based on an arbitrary figure but on budgetary needs. One of the chief areas of political debate regarding policy should be the budget. The budget is how the government gets things done. The media should be informing the public about just how this is accounted for in the budget.

Then, after all this, a progressive tax regime should be enacted. But to talk about taxes with going through these steps is folly, because it will just perpetuate a failed system until it implodes of its own weight or destroys itself through ill-advised militarism.

That's just for starters. Then we need to be having a debate about what kind of country and world we want based on visionary possibilities in the long term and practical opportunities in the short term.

Right now, the vision of the US elite is world domination for the foreseeable future, which requires dollar hegemony and superpower status to prevent anyone from ever challenging US supremacy economically or militarily, along with a military-corporatist-financial-governmental revolving door guaranteeing that wealth and power flow to the top.

This requires ever-increasing centralization. The antidote to this is decentralization of wealth and power. Policy needs to be redirected to this end.

when we began talking about the now real and imminent meltdown, here at the Agonist, about 4 years ago, one of the "delusions" as it was called then, was that "the rich and the corporations are going to give the money back".

and as you have said, there is no other place to go. my understanding is that corporations, not so long ago made up ~24% of federal tax revenues which now has dropped to about 8% ? something like that.
given the bloody-murder-screaming we all have done at the profits of Exxon etc. and then some, i don't think it will be a hard sell either. it's way too late, but better late than not at all.

what do you think about the idea that we will default on what we owe China? just say, "hey, sorry about that, we overspent and well,...we're bankrupt." ?

1700: "Abolish slavery!"
1800: Woman's Suffrage!"
2000:"World Peace!"