Since the plutocrats and their congressional lackeys have re-branded the rich as Job Creators, and label any suggestion that they pay their fair share as "Job-Killing", how about taking them at their word and redesigning the millionaire tax to follow the principles of their argument?
Over the last decade we have seen substantial decreases in the effective tax rates on the Job Creators, along with an unprecedented increase in their wealth (and only theirs, not anyone else's). Alas, this has not resulted in job growth. Nevertheless let's go ahead and accept the right's insistence that job growth is primarily dependent on the well being of the wealthy elite.
Instead of lowering their taxes yet again and hoping that this time it will increase employment - a strategy that has spectacularly failed over the last decade, why not design it so that the Job Creators will be rewarded for creating jobs?
Let's structure a millionaire surcharge tax that is tied to the unemployment rate - for instance set the surcharge rate at the unemployment rate minus 5%, and apply it to all income, including capital gains, royalties, etc. Thus today's surcharge would be 9.1% minus 5% = 4.1% on all income over 1 million dollars.
Why subtract 5 from the unemployment rate? Because that is just a bit over the so-called friction unemployment rate that is considered full employment. It is important to this concept to have an achievable employment goal.
An employment pegged surtax would give the Job Creators an incentive to create enough jobs to reduce their surtax to zero.
A more nuanced formula may be desirable - one that takes into account discouraged workers and the underemployed, and even median wages. It wouldn't be very meaningful if the Job Creators only provided part time minimum wage jobs instead of full time living wage positions. But the goal should still be to zero out the surtax by reaching an achievable employment level.
The advantage of this is that it would help to even out revenues in the face of the business cycle - in particular raising the extra revenue needed when unemployment spikes and increases the cost of entitlements like food stamps and unemployment insurance, and then when unemployment falls, the revenues lost from the millionaire surtax is compensated by reduced need for entitlements and increased taxes paid by the newly employed.
Let's give the Job Creators an economic incentive to create jobs.