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

Peter S. Wenz

Aug 2012 · MIT Press

About this eBook

Reality-based arguments against right-wing fantasies: the case for reducing income inequality, rebuilding our infrastructure, investing in education, and putting people back to work.

Midcentury America was governed from the center, a bipartisan consensus of politicians and public opinion that supported government spending on education, the construction of a 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 point during the Republican Eisenhower administration of 91 percent. Today, a similar agenda of government action (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 considered part of the mainstream. In Take Back the Center, Peter Wenz makes the case for a sane, 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 from the mid-twentieth-century high of 91 percent to a twenty-first-century low of 36 percent—even as social programs are gutted and the gap betweeen rich and poor widens dramatically.

Ever since Ronald Reagan famously declared that government was the problem and not the solution, conservatives have had an all-purpose answer to any question: smaller government and lower taxes. Wenz offers an impassioned 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 he offers 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's evidence-driven arguments, progressives can position themselves where they belong: in the mainstream of American politics and at the center of American political conversations, helping their country address a precipitous decline in equality and quality of life.

Ratings and reviews

This is complete BS. You can't even call it leftist. It's so far away from what this country is founded on its ridiculous. If you think another way other than hard work, dedication, goals, and an ever reaching drive to attain more knowledge and value to who you are and what you can contribute exist, than go ahead and sit back. Wait for someone else to do it and then justify how you should benefit from it. The pilgrims tried this, the first 2 years, then, the third year they decided to many people weren't contributing enough through the year to pull equall shares through the winter. In some cases they contributed nothing. Look into it. You tell me how much of my money you deserve and then tell me why you deserve it.

About the author

Peter S. Wenz is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Springfield and University Scholar at the University of Illinois. He is the author of Beyond Red and Blue: How Twelve Political Philosophies Shape American Debates (MIT Press) and other books.