It’s easy to forget now, but until the Reagan era, top-income-bracket earnings were taxed at 70 percent, or even higher. Yet those taxes were eventually chipped away, doomed by a political asymmetry: the wealthy had a direct personal interest in lowering the tax rate, while everyone else had only an indirect interest in fighting to keep it.

Two pioneering policy thinkers recently offered their thoughts on how to combat rising inequality in a panel discussion led by Janet Gornick, director of the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality. Perhaps their most provocative proposal: imposing a “maximum wage.”

Not long ago, the idea wasn’t so radical, as Sam Pizzigati, author of The Case for a Maximum Wage, pointed out to an audience at The Graduate Center, CUNY. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a 100 percent tax on incomes over $25,000, the equivalent of about $375,000 today. Though Congress didn’t pass FDR’s plan, it did approve a 94 percent tax on income over $200,000.

If Americans were to consider a similar tax regime again, what would prevent another backlash?

The solution, Pizzigati says, is to focus on capping the gap in income — such as the ratio between CEO compensation and the wage received by the lowest-paid worker at a firm — rather than capping income above a specific figure. “If we link a cap on pay at the top to pay at the bottom, the income of our richest would only rise if the income of our poorest rose first,” he said. “Our richest would have a vested personal interest in helping our poorest. And the poor would have a vested personal interest in keeping that linkage in place.”

And as noted by Chuck Collins — author of Is Inequality in America Irreversible? — there are signs that society is now willing to consider increasing taxes that until recently seemed unthinkable in the post-Reagan years. Campaigns like California College for All, which advocates for tuition-free education at California state universities by restoring the state estate tax, are particularly popular with younger generations.

At the same time, proposals from political candidates and freshman members of Congress are getting a lot of attention, perhaps as more voters become familiar with the stark facts of inequality in America, where the three wealthiest people — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett — have as much wealth as the entire lower half of U.S. households.

Read more:

· Vox: How to Tax the Rich, Explained

· Washington Center for Equitable Growth: Wealth Taxation: An Introduction to Net Worth Taxes and How One Might Work in the United States

· Roosevelt Institute: Effective Progressive Tax Rates in the 1950s

This event was held on March 13, 2019 and is part of the The Graduate Center’s public programming.