What's the Rationale for Raising Taxes on Billionaires?

There's a lot of talk about raising taxes on the rich, with Elizabeth Warren announcing her candidacy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engorging conservatives' ... ire, the peripatetic Bernie Sanders, and the backlash Howard Schulz has gotten for demanding Democrats genuflect before him and his billions.

The question, though, is why should we raise taxes on the rich. We don't want to punish people for simply being successful -- it's the American dream. Is there some underlying logic that would justify taxing billionaires at 70% or higher, as we did during the 1950s (which conservatives always look back at nostalgically as the pinnacle of American greatness)?

There is a long-standing tradition of taxing things that cause problems in society. For example, alcohol and tobacco. It's a way of punishing sins that we have found impossible to make illegal, but wish to discourage or minimize.

The case for taxing alcohol and tobacco is clear: alcohol is a dangerous drug, costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars in increased crime (40% of violent crimes are committed under the influence), automobile crashes, lost productivity and medical costs due to accidents and alcoholism. Tobacco costs billions of dollars in lost productivity (smokers are always on break), medical costs and causes millions of deaths due to cancer and emphysema. And it's the leading cause of home fires, costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Gambling costs billions in lost productivity and embezzlement by gambling addicts. So we tax gambling heavily, or give government a monopoly on it, as with lotteries.

So one argument for taxing billionaires is that their lust for wealth causes problems, just like alcohol, tobacco and gambling. And sure enough, billionaires do cause many serious social problems.

Look at the Sackler family, the people behind Purdue Pharma, who were responsible for pushing prescription opioids and addicting millions of Americans, killing hundreds of thousands in the last decade.

Other pharmacy billionaires (like Martin Shkreli) have been jacking up the price of prescription drugs 10-, 20- and 100-fold, solely to increase profits. This forces millions of Americans into medical bankruptcies. Millions of patients are rationing their insulin and hypertension medications, and some have stopped taking them altogether, causing numerous complications and death in many cases. These guys are committing blackmail: your money or your life.

Oil, coal and pipeline billionaires keep denying that burning fossil fuels causes climate change. But we're already seeing the effects right now, today, with the drastically increased destructive power of extreme weather and the massive flooding that accompanies it.

Industrial agriculture billionaires have made farmers dependent on genetically engineered corn and soybeans, forcing them to spend themselves into the poorhouse buying seed and the chemicals required to poison weeds. These companies then sue farmers who try to plant seed from the grain they grow, the way farmers have for thousands of years. And now Donald Trump's tariffs have yanked the market out from under them.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey have set Americans at each other's throats, severely damaged the free press and helped put a narcissistic man-child in the Oval Office.

Uber's Travis Kalanick has turned thousands of Americans into struggling "ride share" drivers, and made the lives of struggling old-school cab drivers a living hell, causing many to commit suicide.

Hedge fund billionaires buy companies in hostile takeovers, take out big loans against those companies, pay themselves big returns, run the business into the ground, declare bankruptcy, then bust the company up and sell the pieces, screwing all the employees and the people they borrowed money from.

Walmart and the entire fast-food industry pay workers peanuts and force them to work part-time, so they can avoid paying full-time benefits such as health care. Millions of Americans are working 60 to 80 hours a week, taking two or three different part-time jobs, and they still don't have enough money to live on.

Even relatively benign billionaires, like automobile execs, create social costs by increasing the demand for more and more freeways, and reducing the demand for much more efficient modes of transportation like mass transit. And large businesses in general increase government expenditures by requiring government spending on infrastructure like roads and ports, as well as schools for educating their future employees.

Pretty much every person or company who makes billions of dollars is incurring some kind of social cost that they're not paying for. So society should recoup that cost by taxing them at a compensatory rate.

In their lust for the almighty buck many billionaires ignore the problems their businesses cause. The things they do may not be explicit crimes, but their greed causes more social harm than all the two-bit crooks put together.

Greed is a sin. One of the seven deadly ones. And we should tax it.