Some politicians are calling for higher taxes on the rich. Naturally, these proposals have unleashed a torrent of opposition – mostly from…the rich. Here are the 12 biggest myths they’re propounding:

Myth 1: A top marginal tax rate applies to all of a rich person’s total income or wealth.

Wrong. It would only apply to dollars in excess of a certain level. The 70 percent income tax rate proposed by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would apply only to dollars in excess of 10 million dollars a year. The 2 percent wealth tax proposed by Elizabeth Warren would apply only to wealth in excess of 50 million dollars.

Myth 2 : Raising taxes on the rich is a far-left idea.

Baloney. 70 percent of Americans – including 54 percent of Republicans – support raising taxes on families making more than 10 million dollars a year.  And expecting the rich to pay their fair share is a traditional American idea. From 1930 to 1980, the average top marginal income tax rate was  78 percent. From 1951 to 1963 it exceeded 90 percent – again, only on dollars in excess of a very high threshold. Even considering all deductions and tax credits, the very rich paid over half of their top incomes in taxes.

Myth 3: A wealth tax is unconstitutional.

Rubbish. Most locales already impose an annual wealth tax on the value of peoples’ homes – the main source of household wealth for most people. It’s called the property tax. The rich hold most of their wealth in stocks and bonds, so why should these forms of wealth escape taxation? Article I Section 8 of the Constitution gives “Congress [the] power to lay and collect taxes.”

Myth 4: When taxes on the rich are cut, they invest more and everyone benefits, when taxes on the rich are increased, economic growth slows.

Utter baloney. Trickle-down economics is a cruel joke. Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all cut taxes on the rich, and nothing trickled down. There’s no evidence that higher taxes on the rich slows economic growth. To the contrary, when the top marginal tax rate has been high – between 71 to 92 percent – growth has averaged 4 percent a year. But when top rate has been low – between 28 and 39 percent – growth has averaged only 2.1 percent.

Myth 5: When you cut taxes on corporations, they invest more, and create more jobs.

Wrong again. After Trump and the Republicans lowered the corporate tax rate in 2018, America’s largest corporations cut more jobs than they created. They used their tax savings largely to increase their stock prices by buying back their own shares of stock – enriching executives and wealthy investors but providing no real benefit to the economy.

Myth 6: The rich already pay more than their fair share in taxes.

This is misleading, because it focuses only on income taxes – leaving out the large and growing tax burden on lower-income Americans; payroll taxes, state and local sales taxes, and property taxes take bigger bites out of the pay of lower-income families than higher-income.

Myth 7: The rich shouldn’t be taxed more because they already pay capital gains taxes.

Misleading. Rich families avoid paying capital gains taxes by passing their wealth on to their heirs. In fact, the largest share of big estates transferred from generation to generation are unrealized capital gains that have never been taxed.

Myth 8: The estate tax is a death tax that hits millions of Americans.

Baloney. The current estate tax, which only applies to assets in excess of 11 million dollars, or 22 million dollars for couples, affects fewer than 2,000 families.

Myth 9: If taxes are raised on the wealthy, they’ll find ways to evade them. So very little money is going to be raised.

More rubbish. For example, a 2 percent wealth tax, as proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren, would raise around 2.75 trillion dollars over the next decade with very little tax evasion, according to research. A 70 percent tax on incomes over 10 million would raise close to 720 billion dollars over 10 years.

Myth 10: The only reason to raise taxes on the wealthy is to collect revenue.

No. Although these proposals would generate lots of revenue – and help us reduce the national debt while investing in schools, roads, and all the things we need – another major purpose is to reduce inequality, and thereby safeguard democracy against oligarchy.

Myth 11: It’s unfair to raise taxes on the wealthy.

Actually, it’s unfair not to raise taxes on the rich.  For the last 40 years, most Americans have seen no growth in their incomes at all, while the incomes of a minority at the top have skyrocketed. We’re rapidly heading toward a society dominated by a handful of super-rich, many of whom have never worked a day in their lives. More than 60 percent of wealth in America is now inherited.

Myth 12: They earned it. It’s their money.

Hogwash. It’s their country, too. They couldn’t maintain their fortunes without what America provides – national defense, police, laws, courts, political stability, and the Constitution. They couldn’t have got where they are without other things America provides – education, infrastructure, and a nation that respects private property. And to argue it’s “their money” also ignores a lot of other ways America has bestowed advantages on the rich – everything from bailing out Wall Street bankers when they get into trouble, to subsidizing the research of Big Pharma.

So the next time you hear one of these myths, know the truth.

When unions are strong, all workers are better off. Yet, for too long we have devalued the role of labor in our economy and in our country. It is time to stand up and fight back! At The Sanders Institute Gathering, labor leaders from around the country came together to talk about the path forward. They talked about specific goals for individual unions like the Postal Workers Union advocating for a postal bank and vote-by-mail, successes that unions like NNU have had in educating their members and encouraging activism, and the path forward for our country as a whole.

As Democrats on Capitol Hill and the campaign trail present an array of ambitious and expensive policy proposals, from a Green New Deal to Medicare for All, the question they face most often is, “How will the government pay for it?”

The answer, increasingly, comes from a professor at Stony Brook University on Long Island, Stephanie Kelton, who has become the public face of an unorthodox strain of economics called modern monetary theory. It is pitting mainstream economists and deficit hawks against left-wing progressives.

Ms. Kelton argues the government doesn’t need to worry so much about how much it borrows to pay for spending programs. Unlike a household or business, it can never run out of money. The government can always print money to pay for debts. The constraint, according to MMT, isn’t the deficit, but whether the borrowing and spending spurs inflation and disrupts economic activity.

With inflation and interest rates now very low, the government has plenty of room to borrow and spend more, MMT advocates say. The notion has gained traction among Democratic presidential hopefuls, helping to fuel ambitious policy proposals.

“If you were being responsible, you’d want to approve new spending not because you can demonstrate that it won’t add to the deficit, but because you can demonstrate that it won’t create dislocation, inflationary pressure—real problems in the economy,” Ms. Kelton said in an interview.

The theory, which Ms. Kelton helped establish in the late 1990s, has gotten approving nods from Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the Democratic presidential contender whom she advised in 2016, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.).

The rise of MMT comes as mainstream economists are reconsidering the danger of deficits. Former International Monetary Fund chief economist Olivier Blanchard, former Council of Economic Advisers chairman Jason Furman and Harvard University economics professor Kenneth Rogoff have all said recently the U.S. appears to have more room to borrow than they once thought.

Republicans, too, have backed away from past opposition to large deficits. With Republicans in control of the White House and Congress in 2017 and 2018, deficits marched toward $1 trillion, in part because of tax cuts and increased military spending.

The deficit totaled 4.5% of economic output last year, compared with an average of 2.9% over the previous 50 years. Debt-to-GDP has more than doubled, from 35% at the end of 2007 to 78% by the end of 2018, and is on track to hit 93% by 2029.

“MMT has been standing with its feet in the same spot for decades,” Ms. Kelton said. “The mainstream economists keep inching, inching, a little bit closer. It’s something we’ve been watching for a very long time.”

Ms. Kelton is everywhere these days—on cable television and public radio, penning opinion columns and keynoting financial industry conferences. She has a book on MMT being released in April 2020.

Still, many mainstream economists on the left and right say MMT takes the idea of deficit spending too far.

In a survey by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business of 38 mainstream academic economists, 88% disagreed or strongly disagreed that countries that borrow in their own currency don’t need to worry about deficits.

The critics say MMT will lead to the very outcome Ms. Kelton and other proponents says it is designed to avoid: surging inflation and interest rates. They also say rising government spending will crowd out more productive private investment.

“How much more debt can you have on the U.S. balance sheet and not have global financial markets react? I don’t know the answer to that,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a right-leaning think tank, and former Congressional Budget Office director. “I see no reason to run the experiment, ‘When do we have a crisis?’ Let’s just not.”

Mainstream economists say the government must tax businesses and households to pay for spending. Whatever it doesn’t raise through taxes it borrows by issuing bonds.

MMT rejects this as backward. Spending isn’t constrained by the government’s ability to raise taxes or borrow, because the government can always create more money to fund itself. The real constraint on spending is the ability of the economy to absorb new spending without creating shortages and inflation.

In this worldview, fiscal and monetary policy are more tightly intertwined than in conventional economics. The central bank could accept IOUs from the Treasury to fund new spending—a step it can’t necessarily take under current law—and inflation can be tamed by fiscal policy makers by raising taxes, cutting spending or imposing new regulations. Critics say it is politically impractical and the central bank is best left to manage inflation independently, as it is called on to do in all advanced economies today.

Some of Ms. Kelton’s toughest criticism has come from the left. Some say more government spending is justified now because interest rates are low and would help facilitate it, but they see MMT as the wrong framework for justifying such action.

Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a Democrat, in a Foreign Affairs article panned MMT as a ”poor guide to policy in normal economic times.” When Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and a liberal columnist for the New York Times, tweeted last month, “Still don’t see what we get out of it,” referring to MMT, Ms. Kelton shot back, “How about a superior analytic framework and better predictive record (20+ years running) than any other macro approach.”

She continues to advise the senator on a plan for a federal jobs guarantee, though she hasn’t formally joined any 2020 presidential campaign.

“I don’t feel like just because we’re staring down trillion-dollar deficits we’re out of room and Congress can’t be considering ambitious spending,” she said, predicting the debt-to-GDP ratio could easily reach 150% without causing problems for the economy.