The Bush Tax Cuts and the 99 Percent

I forgot to alert you to my latest Atlantic column, which went up on Monday. To my mind, Occupy Wall Street is a protest movement, and a valuable one, and the often-stated criticism that they should have concrete demands is kind of silly. (See Frank Pasquale’s response, point 5.) I have spent a fair amount of time reading the 99 Percent tumblr, however, and I think the kind of policies that would help the people who describe themselves there are pretty obvious. This is Mike Konczal’s summary:

“Upon reflection, it is very obvious where the problems are. There’s no universal health care to handle the randomness of poor health. There’s no free higher education to allow people to develop their skills outside the logic and relations of indentured servitude. Our bankruptcy code has been rewritten by the top 1% when instead, it needs to be a defense against their need to shove inequality-driven debt at populations. And finally, there’s no basic income guaranteed to each citizen to keep poverty and poor circumstances at bay.”

But in my opinion, the preliminary step to getting rich (and reasonably comfortable) people to pay for a better social safety net is to let the Bush tax cuts expire, as I argue in the column. Most importantly, it’s the only inequality-reducing policy I can think of that has any chance of happening in the next year—simply because it only requires doing nothing. How much would it reduce inequality? That’s just the reverse of what the tax cuts did in the first place. (If you can’t read the table, click here for a larger version.)