Mayor Pete’s 49.9999% Tax Bracket

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/pete-buttigieg-2020-progressive.html

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“Being left of Obama doesn’t make you extremely progressive,” Pete Buttigieg told me last week, when we met in Chicago to record a conversation for the new episode of “The Argument” podcast.

My question to Buttigieg — the mayor of South Bend, Ind., and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate — had been about tax policy. Specifically, I wanted to know whether he supported an annual wealth tax and how high he thought the top marginal income tax rate should be.

He said he did support a wealth tax, arguing that it was not so different from a property tax. On income taxes, he said something I hadn’t heard him, or anyone else, say before: He is intrigued by a top rate of 49.9999 percent. “There’s something about paying the majority of a dollar that comes your way to Uncle Sam that I think people have more trouble with,” he explained. He also said he would favor a financial transaction tax.

All of that adds up to a highly progressive agenda, I responded. President Obama, by comparison, raised the top rate to 39.6 percent and didn’t pass either a wealth tax or a financial transaction tax.

That’s when Buttigieg said that merely being to Obama’s left doesn’t make somebody extremely left-wing.

“Remember that he was the last Democratic president of the Reagan era,” Buttigieg said. Obama was constrained by congressional Republicans and by a misunderstanding among many politicians, in both parties, about how progressive the American public really was on economic policy. “What I’m proposing might be considered conservative by the standards of the 50s, 60s or 70s.” Buttigieg said. “And so where I think we are today is the beginning of a totally new chapter.”

As I’ve thought back on the hour that we spent talking, I’m most struck by Buttigieg’s combination of ambition and realism. His agenda is highly ambitious, spanning much higher taxes on the rich; both a Green New Deal approach and a carbon tax; statehood for Washington, D.C., and potentially Puerto Rico; abolition of the Electoral College; a less politicized Supreme Court; and more.

But he is also comfortable with the idea of compromise in the service of his goals. “The reason I think we should undertake some of these very bold debates is precisely because they’re going to take a long time and a lot of work,” he said. “It means we don’t have a moment to lose.”

After our conversation on the podcast, you can hear my colleagues Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg talk about Buttigieg’s candidacy. Michelle is more sympathetic to it than Ross, not surprisingly, but both raise some smart concerns.

The most obvious one is his relative lack of experience. As I suggested during the interview, I think it’s a weakness for his candidacy but not necessarily a fatal one. Buttigieg clearly has much less experience than most presidents did. On the other hand, he’s run a city for seven years and served in the Navy, which would give him more relevant experience coming into the job than President Trump had and roughly as much as Obama had.

Related: In March, I spoke with Senator Elizabeth Warren, another 2020 candidate, for “The Argument.” We will have more candidate interviews in the months to come.

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