For Democrats aiming taxes at the superrich, ‘the moment belongs to the bold’

The only thing more startling than the flurry of tax proposals Democrats have unveiled in recent weeks is the full-throttle response they’ve gotten from the public.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested a near doubling of the top income tax rate. Senator Bernie Sanders, who caucuses with the party, introduced a bill to raise taxes on dynastic heirs. And Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a levy that has never existed in the United States: a wealth tax, assessed annually on America’s biggest fortunes.

The soak-the-rich plans — ones that were only recently considered ridiculously far-fetched or political poison — have received serious and sober treatment, even by critics, and remarkably broad encouragement from the electorate. Roughly three out of four registered voters surveyed in recent polls supported higher taxes on the wealthy. Even a majority of Republicans back higher rates on those earning more than $10 million, according to a Fox News poll conducted in mid-January.

Riding the momentum of a 40-seat pickup in the midterm elections, Democrats are bringing to the fore audacious policy ideas that have been mostly simmering on the sidelines. As the middle class continues to thin out and wealth concentrates among a tiny sliver of Americans, the party’s powerhouses are questioning economic verities that have stood for decades.

Not since President Bill Clinton urged Americans to embrace a hands-off, neoliberal approach to markets — declaring in his 1996 State of the Union that “the era of big government is over” — have Democrats experimented with such a shift in fundamental economic assumptions. Taxes, deficits, spending, financial deregulation — everything is up for appraisal.

“This is clearly a tectonic shift in what Democrats are willing to propose,” said William Gale, a co-director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, referring specifically to the latest tax proposals. “It just feels like a very different environment for policy discussions than, say, two or three months ago.”