The problem with just raising the income tax on upper brackets is that for the very rich—those whose income is primarily in the form of dividends, divestments and compound speculation—can quite easily and legally shield themselves from that by effectively having no ‘income’ in the form of paychecks or personal revenue. Their personal ‘operating funds’ are all loans on which they owe interest, which can reduce net income to less than zero (although the interest is paid by taking out other loans), all of which are based on assets owned by trusts that exist primarily to provide them with access to capital without directly owning it. Very wealthy people are essentially ‘cash poor’ and may even be technically “asset poor” even though they control hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of what is de facto personal wealth, and can even use this status to qualify for entitlements in the form of government subsidies, guarantees, loans, incentives, tax rebates, et cetera that dwarf the ‘welfare’ reluctantly doled out to those below the poverty line, all benefits inaccessible to ‘working class’ or even upper middle class people whose primary assets are a few pieces of personally owned real estate, small business assets, and a healthy retirement fund.
Medicare at 60 is kind of a tepid start to something that should essentially be the default for a wealthy nation, and “climate” should be an apolitical issue that everyone should be concerned about, and especially all those Republicans in Florida living within five meters above mean sea level, but Fox News, Koch Brothers, et al have made science a political issue in ways unseen since the Catholic Church condemned Galileo for advocating his theory of heliocentricism.
Stranger