Progressive taxation saps pc

Jonathan, New York Magazine, “Biden Wants to Tax Billionaires Because U.S. Politics Is Still a Class War Democrats and Republicans are mostly divided over redistribution,” March 29, 2022 dmr

If you look at the total redistributive effect of the tax code, it is quite modest: The point is that Republicans without exception believe that this slim level of redistribution nonetheless punishes the rich too heavily. Since the New Deal, the Democratic Party has been organized around greater levels of economic redistribution and the Republican Party around lesser levels. Following the Reagan era, the Republican position radicalized — since 1990, an era when Republican rhetoric has routinely presented the deficit as a first-order social crisis, there have been zero Republican votes at the federal level for even a penny of higher taxes on the rich. Meanwhile, every Democratic presidency has devoted substantial political capital to raising taxes on the rich. Biden hasn’t succeeded yet, a failure attributable to the narrowness of his congressional majority. Joe Manchin opposes Biden’s plan to tax unrealized billionaire capital gains but favors other plans to tax the rich. At least some increase in tax on the rich seems likely to pass on a party-line vote. There are several reasons why the tightly drawn class warfare between the two parties tends to recede into the background of the political debate. It is familiar and long-standing, i.e., not new. The media is more drawn to social-issue controversies than economic-policy fights. Conservatives are strategic about changing the subject away from economic-policy fights in which their party has an unpopular stance, while progressives are not strategic enough to focus on them. And the Trump era has made it especially fashionable for analysts across the spectrum to conceptualize Republicans as the proletarian party, an idea that substitutes a focus on the party’s voters for one on its policy agenda. But the banal fact remains that redistribution in general, and taxing the rich in particular, remains the primary ground the two parties are fighting over on a daily basis. The best thing Biden can do for himself is to remind people of this.