From Piketty and Saez, via the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Combine this with this:
And you get really rich rich people, and ... everybody else.
And yet you end up with journalists writing in all seriousness about the French election: "First, the good news: The left almost certainly will lose."
And you end up with articles that present taxes purely as a burden - money taken from you and that disappears, and never as a payment for necessary services, or as an investment in a community's future. As I wrote this morning over at European Tribune, economic journalism insidiously focuses on certain categories of people - the young, the healthy, the single, the professionals - those that are successful or expect to be, that do not need solidarity to take care of their healthcare, of the education of their children (if they have any) or of their pensions. By presenting them as victims of taxes, without ever discussing the simultaneous benefits to society of these taxes - and to them at some point in the future - these articles perpetuate a mindset that taxes are pure waste, used to prop up parasites and should only go down - it's their historic, natural, unavoidable destiny.
And thus you end up with societies that are increasingly unfair, with a stunning concentration of wealth at the top, and everybody else losing out.
A surprise rise in child poverty casts the government's strategy into doubt
TONY BLAIR'S most famous pronouncements on wealth aim at opposite ends of the income distribution. The prime minister once declared that Labour would abolish child poverty within a generation. He also said he had no burning ambition to make sure that David Beckham, a commodity with a sideline in football, earns any less.
In putting these two thoughts together, Mr Blair was sticking to a consensus that has held for the past 20 years. Broadly, this says that the rich can get as rich as they like, so long as the poor are getting better-off too.
However, new figures out this week suggest that the bargain isn't working. The number of poor children, as defined by the government, has grown by 100,000 in the past year. Furthermore, overall income inequality has grown too (see chart), despite hefty redistribution under Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer.
And that's in a nominally Labor European government, which has vastly increased public spending on things like education and healthcare (even while promoting "market" mechanisms everywhere and lambasting others who are more open about the role government should play)
Not taxing the rich has only one result: the rich are richer. Maybe that's a legitimate goal, but it should be clear that it's the only result. Prosperity for others is not included.
But that will be the only result of economic policy for so long as too many on the left accept the dominant discourse of the efficiency of markets, and the need for "reform" and liberalisation, and deregulation, and the dominance of narrow economic criteria over policy choices.
Take a look at the graphs above - they are the inevitable result of the politics of "economic efficiency" and the demonization of the concepts of government and tax.
If you don't fight for good government, and for the need to pay for it, you will not get good government.