This is a third-hand quote, but it is amazing:

“I think there is a prudential reason for maintaining a progressive tax system (and we certainly can argue about “how” progressive it should be): namely, that if you believe, as I do, that the U.S. is best served by maintaining a capitalist system and a free market, we have to accept that one of the natural consequences of such a system is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.

Regardless of whether these fewer and fewer deserve the money they accumulate or are unfairly being punished by progressive taxation, the political consequence of such an accumulation of wealth is radicalism - a majority that uses its political power to destroy the system rather than simply to modify it.

In other words, progressive taxation is required to maintain the political viability of a free market.”

Original post and commentary here.

Here are some graphs I created (sources of data at the bottom):

Here you can see an overlay of both graphs, and you can compare the wealth held by the top 1% (green line) with the amount of taxes they paid. Notice the times when ‘life was good’ — the teens, and the 50’s and 60’s, the taxes on the rich were sky high, and they held the least wealth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_States
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
(an awesome source, check it out)

Cash is more than just cash, it’s opportunities. Once education or owning a shelter are commodified, they are subject to the same rules as money: he who hordes them wins. We have tried to shoehorn freedom into the mould of capitalism, but some things just shouldn’t be capitalizeD.

Sarah Palin won’t stop ranting about how Obama is going to turn the country into a communist state:

“See, under a big government, more tax agenda, what you thought was yours would really start belonging to somebody else, to everybody else.”

In classic Palin style, she singlehandedly accuses liberals of advocating abolition of private property, while at the same time blurting out a completely unintegrated noun phrase “more tax agenda” that sounds like some kind of Buzzword-Tourette’s tic.

This single sentence is a scintillating example of the Republican strategy: make people fear your opponent with utterly inarticulate, nonsensical, baseless accusations, delivered with a contrived appeal to down-home sensibility. And tragically, this seems to be working.

To me, the discourse plays out as follows:

Liberals: “The rich are getting richer at expense of the poor.”
Republicans: “You are a redistributionist.”
Liberals: “No, it’s just alarming that in 1980, the top 7% owned 20% of the wealth, and today the top 1% owns the same amount. We need to rebuild the middle class.”
Republicans: “You are a socialist.”

Republicans are just calling names, they aren’t offering any real solutions to the problem that our country is becoming a plutocracy.

Well let me make a radical claim: redistribution is exactly what we need right now. At times, that word has been (rightly) treated as a profanity, but today it shouldn’t be. The pendulum has swung too far in the direction of plutocracy, and it’s time that it swing back towards fairness. You may call that change in direction “socialism”, but we have to pull to get back to center.