High Taxes on the Rich Hurt Them and Help Everyone Else

The plain economic truth is that we are not all in it together.

When our economic policies helped the middle class, they hurt the rich. In the 1950s it was a lot harder to get rich than it is now, largely because of tax rates up to 90%. Cutting those taxes helped the rich, and helped a lot of people get rich. But there is no evidence that they helped anyone else; since Reagan's big tax cut the poor have struggled and the middle class has been treading water while the rich get richer at a bewildering pace.

So far as I can tell, it is simply a myth that the right economic policies will help everybody. Rich, poor, and middle class really do have different interests, and policies that help one group will probably hurt the others.