Take Back the Center―Progressive Taxation for a New Progressive Agenda

Midcentury America was governed from the center, a bipartisan consensus ofpoliticians and public opinion that supported government spending on education, the construction ofa vast network of interstate highways, healthcare for senior citizens, and environmental protection.These projects were paid for by a steeply progressive tax code, with a top tax rate at one pointduring the Republican Eisenhower administration of 91 percent. Today, a similar agenda of governmentaction (and progressive taxation) would be portrayed as dangerously left wing. At the same time,radically anti-government and anti-tax opinions (with no evidence to support them) are consideredpart of the mainstream. In Take Back the Center, Peter Wenz makes the case for asane, reality-based politics that reclaims the center for progressive policies. The key, he argues,is taxing the wealthy at higher rates. The tax rate for the wealthiest Americans has declined fromthe mid-twentieth-century high of 91 percent to a twenty-first-century low of 36 percent--even associal programs are gutted and the gap betweeen rich and poor widens dramatically. Ever since RonaldReagan famously declared that government was the problem and not the solution, conservatives havehad an all-purpose answer to any question: smaller government and lower taxes. Wenz offers animpassioned counterargument. He explains the justice of raising the top tax rates significantly,making a case for less income inequality (and countering society's worship of the wealthy), and heoffers suggestions for how to spend the increased tax revenues: K-12 education, tuition relief,transportation and energy infrastructure, and universal health care. Armed with Wenz'sevidence-driven arguments, progressives can position themselves where they belong: in the mainstreamof American politics and at the center of American political conversations, helping their countryaddress a precipitous decline in equality and quality of life.