Why "tax the rich" demands are so unreasonable

But the income tax is remarkably progressive. Once again citing the Tax Policy Center (a joint project of two left-of-center think tanks: the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute), Americans in the top 20 percent paid an estimated 87 percent of income taxes for 2018. This was up from 84 percent in 2017, which means that the “Trump tax cuts” actually made the tax code more progressive.

The folks shouting “Tax the rich!” know this, which is why, when they move beyond sloganeering, they say that what they really want is for the rich to “pay their fair share.” This is a more debatable claim because “fair” is in the eye of the beholder. It’s not preposterous to argue that the rich, however defined, should pay a few percentage points more in income tax in the name of fairness. But it’s also not preposterous to say that when 1 percent of the people provide more than a third of income-tax revenue, they’re already paying their fair share — and suggesting that people who don’t want to pay even more are “unpatriotic” is bullying nonsense.

While we’re on the topic of fairness, there’s another common argument for hiking income taxes for the wealthy, or for even simply taxing wealth itself: The rich deserve it. Or, to be more generous, the super-rich don’t deserve their money, while the rest of the country does.