James Taranto:

“When it comes to paying taxes, most Americans think the wealthy do not pay their fair share,” observes the New York Times’s Patricia Cohen. The Democratic candidates for president agree. In last week’s debate, Bernie Sanders railed: “Let me tell you, Donald Trump and his billionaire friends under my policies are going to pay a hell of a lot more in . . . taxes in the future than they’re paying today.” Inevitable nominee Hillary Clinton put it more gently: “Right now, the wealthy pay too little, and the middle class pays too much.”

Cohen means to assure her readers that a policy of punishing the rich would serve other ends as well:

But what could a tax-the-rich plan actually achieve? As it turns out, quite a lot, experts say. Given the gains that have flowed to those at the tip of the income pyramid in recent decades, several economists have been making the case that the government could raise large amounts of revenue exclusively from this small group, while still allowing them to take home a majority of their income.

It is “absurd” to argue that most wealth at the top is already highly taxed or that there isn’t much more revenue to be had by raising taxes on the 1 percent, says the economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel in economic science, who has written extensively about inequality. “The only upside of the concentration of the wealth at the top is that they have more money to pay in taxes,” he said.

That sounds more covetous than practical-minded, doesn’t it? And Cohen provides data that belie Stiglitz’s first assertion: The tax system is quite progressive, with the overall federal burden rising from 3.6% for the lowest income quintile to 7.8%, 13.7%, 17.0% and 25.7% for the top quintile. The trend continues within the top quintile, for whom the burden ranges from 20.0% for the second decile (i.e., the bottom half of the top quintile) to 33.4% for the top 1% and 34.9% for the top 0.1%.

Still, the burden could be heavier. And for those who aren’t quite as zealous as Stiglitz about punishing the rich, Cohen offers a payoff:

Raising [the top 1%’s] total tax burden to, say, 40 percent would generate about $157 billion in revenue the first year. Increasing it to 45 percent brings in a whopping $276 billion. Even taking account of state and local taxes, the average household in this group would still take home at least $1 million a year.

If the tax increase were limited to just the 115,000 households in the top 0.1 percent, with an average income of $9.4 million, a 40 percent tax rate would produce $55 billion in extra revenue in its first year.

That would more than cover, for example, the estimated $47 billion cost of eliminating undergraduate tuition at all the country’s four-year public colleges and universities, as Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, or Mrs. Clinton’s cheaper plan for a debt-free college degree, with money left over to help fund universal prekindergarten.

A tax rate of 45 percent on this select group raises $109 billion, more than enough to pay for the first year of a new $2,500 child tax credit introduced by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida.

How is this any different from enviously imagining what you would do if you got your grubby paws on your wealthy neighbor’s money? And Cohen doesn’t stop with the top 1%. The next paragraph begins: “Move a rung down the ladder and expand the contribution of those in the 95th to 99th percentile . . .,” and imagines raising their overall federal tax burden to 30% from the current 25.2%. The average income in this class is just over $400,000.

There’s an enormous practical problem with this exercise as well. Early in her piece, she observes that for all their talk about “raising taxes at the top,” the Democrats “have not been very specific about how they would do so.”

But neither is Cohen. She imagines an increase in various income classes’ overall federal tax burden, but that is not how taxes are actually assessed. As she acknowledges, the total figure “takes into account the entire menu of taxes—including income tax, payroll taxes that fund Medicare and Social Security, estate and gift taxes, excise and custom duties as well as investors’ share of corporate taxes.”

Exactly what tax laws would one change in order to ensure that the top 1% (or the top 0.1% or the top 5%) gets gouged without harming the middle class? The question is unanswerable—it can’t be done. And as Cohen eventually acknowledges, high-income taxpayers have ways of defending themselves against covetous officials. Example:

Aided by a phalanx of lawyers and accountants, the rich have become adept at figuring out ways to shift earnings that would normally be taxed at the top 39.6 percent rate on ordinary income into capital gains, said the economist Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, who is researching the link between widening inequality and tactics—legal and illegal—used by the wealthy to sidestep taxes.

Naturally Cohen suggests raising the tax on capital gains to match that for ordinary income, but she doesn’t seem much worried about the disincentive effect on investment. (It’s reminiscent of Barack Obama’s assertion in 2008 that he favored raising capital-gains taxes “for purposes of fairness,” even if revenues went down as a result.)

Meanwhile, the main expert she cites calls for new tax breaks to encourage the sort of investment he favors:

“Why give a blank check to all of these guys?” Mr. Stiglitz, the liberal economist, asked. He pointed out that current tax law makes no distinction between, say, investing abroad, speculating in land or building a new factory. A better approach, he said, is to say: “We’ll give you generous deductions if you invest in America.”

The wealthier the taxpayer, the better equipped he is to take advantage of tax-code complications like the “generous deductions” Stiglitz proposes here.

A caption on a chart accompanying Cohen’s piece states: “Taking all federal taxes into account, the richest taxpayers contribute, on average, about a third of their income to the government. But they still enjoy after-tax incomes far higher than those of other Americans.” In other words, wealthy people are wealthier than less-wealthy people. The politics of envy rests on a rejection of that simple logic.

I did not watch the Democratic presidential debate Tuesday night, because I have a life, and the baseball playoffs were on.

Others did, starting with David Harsanyi:

When Democratic Party presidential hopefuls were asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper to list enemies they had made during their careers that they were most proud of, the only candidate who didn’t include any fellow Americans was Jim Webb. Webb—who, it should be noted, didn’t exactly answer the question—explained that it was an enemy soldier who once threw a grenade and wounded him; a soldier who was no longer around. Jim Webb killed a commie because Jim Webb loves America.

Many liberals on social media found this revelation sorta creepy. Yet there was probably a time when liberal voters would have been impressed by someone who had served his country so valiantly. They might have seen promise in a candidate whose populist sensibilities could speak convincingly to the working class and to Southerners, and whose appeal was propelled by both idealism and realism. Webb might have been formidable Democrat presidential candidate 15 years ago. Twenty-five years ago he might have been a star. Today? He’s a man completely out of touch with the philosophical temperament of his party.

Webb may have fought in a war against collectivist authoritarians, but today he’s debating one—a less threatening socialist who regularly lectures thousands of excitable sycophants about the need for more coercion and redistribution. This would have been anathema even for Barack Obama even in 2008. Bernie Sanders is not stigmatized by his ideology. Today there’s almost no genuine philosophical daylight between Sanders’ ideas and the professed positions of front-runner Hillary Clinton. Their disagreement is over what’s achievable. Yet Beltway wisdom tells us only one party has been radicalized in America. Democrats are the adults.

So there was Webb, listening to the former Baltimore mayor lecturing America about how to stop gun violence. There was the former secretary of State, a product of nepotism, big money, and cynical identity politics, who’s flipped on nearly every issue for expediency at some point in her public life, lecturing America about her experience. Lincoln Chafee is not the sort of guy who’s going to be ready on day one. And there was the Democratic Socialist, who plans to spend trillions of dollars on redistributive policies that have created misery and poverty around the world, lecturing us about economics.

“I’ve got a great deal of admiration and affection for Sen. Sanders,” Webb retorted after one of the Vermont senator’s diatribes about toppling the oligarchy. “But, Bernie, I don’t think the revolution’s going to come, and I don’t think the Congress is going to pay for a lot of this stuff.”

Maybe that’s where Webb is wrong. The revolutionary candidate (even when you include Joe Biden) is polling at 24 percent.

So while the revolutionary candidate blames the wealthy, Webb refused to engage in ugly pandering. He insisted that all lives matter when asked the loaded “Black lives or all lives” question by a Facebook user. He refuses to offer soundbites that will please anyone on foreign policy. He’s the only candidate to talk about abuses against privacy from the last administration and point out that this president is guilty of abuses of executive power. He was the only candidate on the stage in Las Vegas who did not selectively embrace the Constitution to make a point about some pet political issue.

Webb detests politics just like the rest of us. You can see it in his eyes. He hates campaigning. He doesn’t like raising money. Last night, Webb exhibited contempt for the bunkum that poured from mouths of people who can claim that climate change is the most pressing problem mankind faces. And I have little doubt he would have been similarly unimpressed by most of the platitudinous answers Republicans offered in their debates.

Now, Webb would be far more conservative than the GOP frontrunner, but his moderate positions on tax policy, immigration, and foreign affairs would make him just disagreeable to most conservatives as he is to most liberals. He isn’t exactly right for either party—not because of some triangulation or convenient moderation, but because he’s not an ideologue. He’s also not a coward, as he’s unwilling to say whatever his party demands in the pursuit of power

In theory, these are all commendable traits. These, in fact, are the sort of things voters are always pretending to look for in a candidate. In reality, this authenticity gets you to around 0.7 percent in the polls. Americans claim not to like the partisanship of Washington. What they mean is they dislike the other guy’s partisanship. What it means for candidates like Jim Webb, serious people who deserve to be heard, is obscurity.

Then there was Comrade Sanders,  of which Kevin D. Williamson writes:

If you are the sort of person who has better things to do — which is to say, a fully functioning adult who is not professionally obliged to follow these things — then you probably missed the exchange between Mrs. Clinton and Senator Sanders at last night’s debate, when she lectured him that the United States isn’t Denmark and he responded with a rousing defense of the Danish model.

Never mind, for the moment, that neither of these batty old geezers has the foggiest idea of what’s going on in Denmark, or in the other Nordic countries. Denmark, like Sweden before it, has been engaged in a long campaign of reforming its famously generous welfare state. The country’s current prime minister is the leader of a center-right party, which, strangely enough, goes by the name “Left,” Venstre. (You might even call it libertarian; its former longtime leader wrote a book bearing the positively Nozickian title “From Social State to Minimal State.”) Denmark has been marching in the direction exactly opposite socialism for some time. Our friends at the Heritage Foundation rank its economy the eleventh most free in the world, one place ahead of the United States, reflecting Denmark’s strong property rights, relative freedom from corruption, low public debt, freedom of trade and investment, etc.

Don’t tell Senator Sanders, but Denmark’s corporate tax rate is a heck of a lot lower than our own.

Senator Sanders is not very serious about imitating Denmark. Denmark has a large and expensive welfare state, which Senator Sanders envies. He doesn’t envy the other part of that handshake: Denmark pays for that large and expensive welfare state the only way that you can: with relatively high taxes on the middle class, whose members pay both high income taxes and a value-added tax. If Senator Sanders were an intellectually honest man, he’d acknowledge forthrightly that the only way to pay for generous benefits for the middle class is to tax the middle class, where most of the income earners are. Instead, he talks about taxing a handful of billionaires to pay for practically everything. Rhetorically, he’s already spent the entire holdings of the billionaire class many times over.

But Senator Sanders does not seem as if he thinks a great deal about these things. He worries about the size of the holdings of our largest banks (I’d bet a dollar that he could not explain the difference between an investment bank and a commercial bank) and frets that six big banks have assets equal to 65 percent of U.S. GDP. He does not consider that in Switzerland there are two banks whose combined assets are well more than twice Switzerland’s GDP, a reflection of the fact that the moneyed people and institutions of the world have a great deal of confidence in Swiss financial institutions, or that similar parties invest with American institutions for similar reasons. And never mind that Denmark’s largest bank has assets totaling 1.6 times Denmark’s GDP — a lot more than the 65 percent split among six banks in the United States that so troubles Sanders. Sanders’s line of thinking seems to go: “Bankers, money, evil, greedy, Make Them Pay!”

Democrats are positively delusional about this stuff, talking about Glass-Steagall as though not repealing it would have changed one thing about the way business was done at a pure-play investment bank such as Lehman Bros. or Bear Stearns. The policy is entirely unrelated to the problem, but neither the Democratic presidential candidates nor their voters understand the problem or the policy. They know only that Copenhagen is lovely, and people like Senator Sanders enjoy citing its “example” while shouting such nonsensical sentences as “Free health care is a right!” …

Our progressive friends argued that Obamacare is just like the Swiss health-care system, which is generally quite highly regarded, and it is, with one important difference: Switzerland is full of Swiss people and the United States is not. The Swiss health-care system turns out to be poorly suited for a country that isn’t Swiss. Any bets on how well the Danish welfare state is going to play in Mississippi and New Jersey?

Progressives who imagine that Americans are one election away from getting to Denmark do not understand Denmark, or America, or much of anything.

Then there’s Hillary Clinton, caught by Charles C.W. Cooke saying …

Asked last night to name “enemies” of which she was “proud,” Hillary Clinton rattled off a list that included “Republicans.”

I haven’t seen a great deal of discussion about this in the aftermath of the debate, and I must say that I’m slightly surprised about that. It’s one thing to say you’re proud that, say, the NRA is your enemy; you can always explain that you respect gun owners and the Second Amendment but oppose the “crazies.” But the other majority political party in the country? The party for which almost half of voters pull the lever? That’s not smart.

Why not? Well, because it opens you up to an obvious attack. When Clinton said it, I could just hear Marco Rubio saying this in a presidential debate:

Secretary Clinton, you said during the primaries that your biggest enemy was “Republicans.” I think that your comment provides the voters with a perfect example of how we differ. I’m a Republican, and, on some of the issues at least, I have some disagreements with the Democratic party. But it is not my enemy. Those who vote for it aren’t my enemies. They’re my neighbors, my colleagues, my friends, the men and women who teach my children, the people I see every day all around my state. On November 8th of this year, I will be asking all Americans for their votes — Democrats, Republicans, independents, everybody. For far too long now we’ve had a political class that refuses to work together; that draws lines around itself based upon its party affiliation; that forgets why it was sent to serve. I want to end that. I want to lead this country into the future as the president of everybody — even those who aren’t sure about me. If you believe that half of the country is your enemy — if you believe that a majority of the people you’ll have to work with are your enemy — you won’t be able to do that. I will.

Is that largely saccharine nonsense? Probably, yes. But don’t underestimate just how well it connects (see: Obama, Barack).

To watch how quickly debate viewers turn off when candidates start attacking one another is to understand how keenly most voters think of themselves as being above the fray. Sure, the line may have endeared Hillary to the crowd last night. But if she’s going to run as an out and out partisan who regards the other side as a nuisance that needs destroying, she’s opening herself up to profitable attack.

That assumes, of course, that other Democrats also do not view Republicans as not opponents, but as enemies.

Clinton continues to show all the negatives of both Bill  Clinton and Barack Obama, and none of the positives. Which doesn’t mean she didn’t win the debate, but new Facebook Friend Ron Fournier warns her:

Hil­lary Clin­ton won. She won be­cause she’s a strong de­bater. She won be­cause Bernie Sanders is not. She won be­cause the first Demo­crat­ic pres­id­en­tial de­bate fo­cused on lib­er­al policies—and not her email scan­dal or char­ac­ter.

The em­battled front-run­ner won her­self a news cycle or two, be­cause she stretched the truth and played to a friendly audi­ence. It won’t al­ways be so. …

Pro­fes­sion­al Demo­crats and the party’s strongest voters are cer­tainly tired of hear­ing about the email scan­dal, but it’s not go­ing to go away—not with the FBI in­vest­ig­at­ing wheth­er con­fid­en­tial in­form­a­tion was mis­handled un­der Clin­ton’s sys­tem and not with in­de­pend­ent voters los­ing faith in Clin­ton’s word.

Char­ac­ter and judg­ment are gate­way polit­ic­al is­sues. An un­trust­worthy can­did­ate might check all your policy boxes, might tickle your ideo­lo­gic­al but­tons, and might even grind away long enough to get your vote—but you’re not go­ing to like it.

That is Clin­ton’s prob­lem. Like it was in 2008, her char­ac­ter is the is­sue that threatens to con­sume all oth­ers.

The email scan­dal re­calls ques­tions about Clin­ton’s in­teg­rity that go back to the Rose Law Firm/White­wa­ter and the White House Travel Of­fice. Flip-flop­ping on the Trans-Pa­cific Part­ner­ship and the Key­stone XL pipeline add weight to the ar­gu­ment made by Demo­crats and Re­pub­lic­ans alike that Clin­ton is a mal­le­able op­por­tun­ist. …

“A ‘Can­cer’ on the Clin­ton Can­did­acy” by Politico’s Glenn Thrush and An­nie Karni climbs in­side the Clin­ton cam­paign to de­scribe a para­noid can­did­ate with me­diocre polit­ic­al skills re­fus­ing ad­vice of staff to come clean on the email is­sue. “We need to throw the facts to the dogs, and let ‘em chew on it,” seni­or ad­visor John Podesta re­portedly told the can­did­ate. In the deeply re­por­ted story based on in­ter­views with 50 ad­visers, donors, Demo­crat­ic op­er­at­ives, and friends, Clin­ton’s team ap­pears to throw her un­der the bus.

That’s cer­tainly how Bill and Hil­lary Clin­ton in­ter­preted the story, ac­cord­ing to three people who talked to them today. “They’re pissed,” said one.

“How to Beat Hil­lary Clin­ton” by the New York­er’s Ry­an Lizza, fea­tured an Oc­to­ber 2007 memo by aides to then-Sen. Barack Obama sig­nal­ing their suc­cess­ful char­ac­ter at­tack against Clin­ton. She “can’t be trus­ted or be­lieved”; “She’s driv­en by polit­ic­al cal­cu­la­tion”; “She em­bod­ies trench war­fare vs. Re­pub­lic­ans”; “She prides her­self on work­ing the sys­tem not chan­ging it.” …