Raising Taxes on the Top 1 Percent

By Hunter Wallace

If the top marginal income tax rate on the wealthy was raised from the current 39.6 percent to 40 percent, The New York Times is saying it would raise enough revenue – from just the top 0.1 percent – to eliminate college tuition at public 4-year universities:

“To get the most accurate picture possible, throw in all the scraps of income, from the most obvious (like wages, interest and dividends) to the least (like employer contributions to health plans, overseas earnings and growth in retirement accounts). According to that measure — used by the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution — the top 1 percent includes about 1.13 million households earning an average income of $2.1 million.

Raising their total tax burden to, say, 40 percent would generate about $157 billion in revenue the first year. Increasing it to 45 percent brings in a whopping $276 billion. Even taking account of state and local taxes, the average household in this group would still take home at least $1 million a year.

If the tax increase were limited to just the 115,000 households in the top 0.1 percent, with an average income of $9.4 million, a 40 percent tax rate would produce $55 billion in extra revenue in its first year.

That would more than cover, for example, the estimated $47 billion cost of eliminating undergraduate tuition at all the country’s four-year public colleges and universities, as Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, or Mrs. Clinton’s cheaper plan for a debt-free college degree, with money left over to help fund universal prekindergarten. …”

Compare the $47 billion dollar annual price tag of eliminating college tuition at public universities to the $2 trillion dollars already squandered on the cuckservative crusade in Iraq alone or the extra $100 billion a year we are paying on medical and disability claims from veterans after a decade of useless wars in Muslim countries.