According to Time, the Center for American Progress (CAP) is “the most influential independent organization in Obama’s nascent Washington.” The brainchild of former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, President Obama “effectively contracted out the management of his own government’s formation to Podesta.” So take notice when CAP senior editor Matthew Yglesias writes in The American Prospect:
The flaw in [Obama’s] budget is that the taxes it proposes are too low. Obama would stabilize revenue at about 18.8 percent of gross domestic product, somewhat lower than it was in the final years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That was enough revenue to fund the programs that existed in 1999, but it’s not enough to implement a transformative domestic agenda that goes beyond our ambitions of 10 years ago.
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An extra annual tax of $500 per capita could raise almost $150 billion. Obtaining a comparable amount from the top 1 percent of individuals would require $50,000 from each of them, an amount that the very wealthiest could easily pay but that is probably an unrealistic burden on those near the bottom of the top 1 percent. To get a lot of money you need to be willing to take at least a little from a broad group of people.
