Vox: Steve Bannon is right: Donald Trump should raise taxes on the rich

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has a big idea that, according to Axios, he's been pushing aggressively within the Trump administration: raising the top income tax rate. He's reportedly telling his colleagues that the top bracket should "have a 4 in front of it." (The current top bracket is 39.6 percent, or 43.4 after you include Medicare taxes.)

This would be a big shift for the administration. Its latest tax plan would cut the top rate on non-investment income to 35 percent, or 37.9 percent including Medicare taxes. Earlier plans featured top rates of 33 percent and 25 percent, and would lower the rate for “pass-through” income that owners of certain businesses get from 39.6 percent to a mere 15 percent, inducing a huge amount of tax evasion and cutting average rates for the rich still further. [...]

But they should. Trump and his team have a tremendous number of goals for tax reform. They want a dramatically lower corporate tax rate (Axios reports that Mnuchin and Cohn “aren't bluffing when they say they want to slash the corporate tax rate to 15% from the current 35%”) and to let companies deduct all their investments immediately, instead of over time. They want a much bigger standard deduction on the individual side, and some kind of subsidy for child care.

Those are expensive changes, which require substantial pay-fors. One of the biggest that Republicans have proposed is the hugely controversial border adjustment measure, which Walmart, the Koch brothers, and other influential business lobbies are loudly opposing. Another is ending the deductibility of interest for debt, a very worthwhile proposal that is sure to enrage banks that take out massive amounts of debt; Goldman Sachs veteran Mnuchin has said he opposes this shift. On the individual side, eliminating the state and local tax deduction, as the Trump team has proposed, would raise money and reduce a big giveaway to rich people in blue states, but then again, the category “rich people in blue states” includes a lot of GOP donors as well as Trump himself.

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