In large part, this desire to resort to high marginal tax rates is a counsel of despair: an admission that we cannot think of policy tools that would command congressional assent and that would restructure the economy that would "predistribute" income in a significantly more egalitarian way. But to the extent that people assign market prices some special moral status—as what you "earn"—this may well be a moral-philosophical mistake, even if it is not a utilitarian-economic mistake:
Dylan Matthews: How to Tax the Rich, Explained: "It’s no accident that the Democratic Party went from wanting a 39.6 percent top tax rate to wanting much more. The 1990s Democratic Party made friends with the rich. The 2008 Democratic Party was eager to bail them out. The 2019 Democratic Party seems ready to declare war.... The Democratic urge to tax the rich isn’t a wholly new development. In the 2016 general election, Hillary Clinton embraced Sanders’s proposal for a 65 percent top estate tax rate, and both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were able to raise the top income tax rate by a few points...
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#noted
