[nostrademons]

When was the last time we've raised tax rates appreciably? The graph I found shows the top marginal tax rate hovering around 30-40% since 1986, and the last major tax increase (> ~10%) being 1949.

https://bradfordtaxinstitute.com/Free_Resources/Federal-Inco...

With a 50-50 Senate split and Manchin committed to bipartisanship, I don't see much chance of successfully passing significant tax increases.

[laverya]

Don't forget Hauser's law [0]: "No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP."

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law

[throw0101a]

An interesting idea from Matthew Yglesias was to not care about maximizing revenue as a primary goal of raising tax rates:

> The Laffer Curve — the idea that tax cuts can sometimes increase tax revenue — is one of the most influential and widely debated ideas in the past two generations of American politics. Beloved by the right and despised by the left, one thing that both sides have tended to agree on is that knowing what side of the curve we're on should be a key driver of tax policy.

> But in an era of surging inequality, it's time to revisit that assumption. Maybe at least some taxes should be really high. Maybe even really really high. So high as to useless for revenue-raising purposes — but powerful for achieving other ends.

> We already accept this principle for tobacco taxes. If all we wanted to do was raise revenue, we might want to slightly cut cigarette taxes. And since cigarettes are about the most-taxed thing in America, we certainly would want to cut out all our other anti-smoking initiatives. But we don't do that because we care about public health. We tax tobacco not to [primarily] make money but to discourage smoking.

* https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5620702/case-for-confiscatory-...