On the rich and taxes

How much should the rich pay in taxes?

An opinion: Did you know that Margaret Thatcher declared war on the wealthy, a war so extreme it makes Obama's seem meek by comparison? The top tax rate in the UK was 60% for most of her term in office, and 40% for the last year or so. At no point was it lower than what Obama proposes -- and that's without taking into account the VAT.

Likewise, Ronald Reagan was apparently a Class Warrior: for six of the eight years during which Reagan was President, the top tax bracket was 50%. It's a wonder anyone worked at all! In Reagan's defense, though, he was just carrying on a long tradition of wealth expropriation carried out by socialists like Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

Now might be a good time for noneconomic policy changes

Someone recently said that moments of crisis present the best opportunities to foster fundamental shifts in national policy. Of course, with trillions of dollars down the hole for the stimulus and other associated bailouts it may not be the greatest time to think about policy changes that involve dollar bills. But, it might be a good time to think about non-economic policy changes.

Four ideas from here: Take tax simplification. Every president since John F. Kennedy promised to simplify the tax code, and the only one to do it even partially was Ronald Reagan, in 1986. Since Reagan, though, the code has gradually become at least as corrupt and illogical as it ever was. The main defenders of the ridiculous complexity of our tax code are lobbyists and the wealthy special interests that employ them. Yet in the current crisis, the need for efficient and fair tax collection that increases revenues and makes cheating much harder may simply become too powerful to ignore.
Or marijuana decriminalization. Putting nonviolent pot smokers behind bars at more than $30,000 a year, spending billions on law enforcement, drug interdiction and crop eradication, and missing out on billions in tax revenue make even less sense when the government, at the state and federal level, is essentially broke.
Or take even more obscure issues, like accurately defining poverty. For 40 years, the official poverty rate has gravely underestimated and mismeasured poverty. Yet no president has had the courage to order the bureaucracy to fix it, because it would mean the number of poor Americans would immediately double. What better time than now to accurately measure poverty, since the numbers of the impoverished may well double anyway?
And then there’s entitlement reform, the so-called third rail in American politics. George W. Bush made Social Security reform the top domestic priority of his second term and got nowhere. President Barack Obama should have better luck, in part because the mood in this crisis will shake up the established order.