Its time to start taxing the very rich..

..say the very rich.

Growing numbers of millionaires and billionaires have gone on record as favoring higher taxes on the rich, because they can afford them and think they’re necessary to deal with our nation’s fiscal problem, which is largely due to historically low revenues.

These include Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Mark Cuban and Nick Hanauer, among others. The group Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength has been lobbying Congress to raise taxes on people like themselves. A similar movement is under way in Europe as well.

It is no longer possible to deny that there has been a sharp rise in the income and wealth of the ultra-rich while everyone else’s income has stagnated. Authoritative recent studies by the Congressional Budget Office and by Anthony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez prove that fact beyond question.

The point is not to punish the rich for being rich — Republicans routinely scream “class warfare” whenever anyone suggests higher taxes on the rich — but to raise revenue. If the rich don’t pay more, everyone else will have to.