This is some high level political hackery by Luntz. The top 1% owns 40% of the nation's wealth, and the bottom 90% owns 20% of it. So, by those standards, the 1% are significantly UNDER-paying taxes and the bottom 90% are OVER-paying.
Here's a recent article on just how skewed the distribution of wealth is in the US these days. washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2…
Tax policy is one, important way in which a society seeks to foster greater economic equity. Luntz's deceptive tweet is part of a politics that suggests that our tax system is already too hard on the rich and too easy on the poor...which is the exact opposite of what is true.
Here's a good graphical description of how income tax rates have changed over the years. You'll notice that between 1940 and 1980 (when America was supposedly great, right?) the top earners paid a far higher rate than they have since the 80s.
And if any originalists out there want to argue about what the founders thought about taxation, let's revisit Thomas Paine's 1792 tract entitled The Rights of Man where he advocated for a system of "progressive taxation." ushistory.org/paine/rights/c…
Paine proposed a graduated system of taxation where the rate would increase as one moved up the wealth scale. His top rate of taxation? 100%
Paine's argument was that over a certain amount of wealth (for him that amount was £23,000) society is far better off redistributing the excess to the poor, the young, the elderly, and the infirm...and the harm that would accrue to those still very rich people was quite minimal.
Whether or not Paine's idea was workable or effective in the 1790s is beside the point...the point is that there's a long history of American patriots seeing tax policy as a legitimate and effective way to foster greater economic equality.
Many of the founders thought that extreme economic inequality was an undemocratic threat to a republic, & that it was perfectly legitimate to take action to prevent the lion's share of wealth from accumulating in the hands of a few.
Paine's mature economic thinking is best captured in his 1796 pamphlet, Agrarian Justice. Interestingly enough, a full transcript of it can be found on the Social Security Administration's website (at least for now). ssa.gov/history/paine4…
Remember when Obama said "you didn't build that?" The point he was trying to make was one Paine had made in 1796. If you have wealth that you didn't produce with your own labor, then you have benefitted from systems you can not take credit for. Thus, you owe something back.
Paine was not calling for the confiscation of all private property, he was calling for a policy regime that would ensure that the natural right to property with which all people were born could be protected.
In a context where almost 50% of all Americans have negative net worth (i.e., own no property free and clear), Paine would say that those people have been stripped of their property rights.
So Paine's point was when you have such extremes of wretchedness and extravagance living cheek by jowl in a country, it's time for something to be done to bend the curve in the other direction.
But you know, Luntz is gonna Luntz. And the centrists are going to decry supposedly "unAmerican, dangerous, and Socialist" ideas like the ones Thomas Freaking Paine advocated 220 years ago.

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More from @SethCotlar

Feb 18
The rightward lurch of the GOP since 2015 has led many to ask "when did it start?" and "how did it happen?" I've been researching the Oregon chapter of that story, and it's clear that 1970 was a key turning point, and that it was a bottom up more than a top down story.
People on the far right mobilized at the county level across the state and almost succeeded in taking over the party in 1970. That would have been shocking since the Oregon GOP Senators Hatfield & Packwood were known for their moderation, if not outright liberalism at the time.
Walter Huss and his fellow "ultraconservatives" continued organizing at the local level and in 1978 finally succeeded in taking over the state GOP. Huss was removed from his chair position after a few disastrous months, but it had a lasting impact.
Read 10 tweets
Feb 18
Has there ever been a television news host who had more consistent and influential access to a sitting President than “fair and balanced” Hannity?
Screenshot from this story. washingtonpost.com/politics/inter…
Flashback to this 2018 reporting. I motion that we refer to Hannity’s show as MAGA-PRAVDA from this point forward. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 17
If you’d told me in 1989 when I was a student in Gordon Wood’s Am Rev class that in thirty years he’d be giving friendly interviews to Trotskyites and publishing in a far right review affiliated with a lawyer who advocated overturning the 2020 election for Donald Trump…well.
Gordon Wood, who was so sensitive about his professional reputation that he was angry that the 1619 Project didn't consult with him, is now affiliating himself with an institution that gave a fellowship to a Pizzagate guy.
To be honest, however, if you'd told me that it was Gordon Wood's interpretation of the history of racism and slavery in the US that would particularly endear him to the class-reductionist left and the anti-anti-racist right, then I would have less surprised by that.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 17
In 1951 the National Association of Manufacturers commissioned a comic book about the dangers of inflation. The art work was by Dan Barry, of Flash Gordon fame.
You can read the entire thing here. I was inspired to search for these online because they were mentioned in Edward Miller's biography of Robert Welch which I'm currently reading. Welch may have had something to do with commissioning this comic. lcamtuf.coredump.cx/communism/Your…
Charles Schulz (yes, that Charles Schulz) was the artist who produced this very understated anti-communist comic in 1947. lcamtuf.coredump.cx/communism/Is%2…
Read 4 tweets
Feb 16
Things one tweets when one has no understanding, like absolutely none, like a howling black hole of the opposite of understanding, of what historians do; and also a raging volcano's worth of misplaced confidence about your ability to make pronouncements about what historians do.
Tell me you've never had an actual conversation with a historian about what they do or read the most basic methodological texts used in introductory theory and methods course without actually telling me that.
The anti-intellectual "public intellectual" is, IMO, not a great look.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 14
I'm starting to think that the people who built their identity around the imperative to "stand athwart history yelling stop" rendered themselves uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the sorts of adjustments necessary to deal with a pandemic of historically-unprecedented scale.
I mean, you can yell "stop" at the coronavirus all you like, but it really doesn't care.
You can yell "stop" at climate change all you like, but it really doesn't care.
Read 5 tweets

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