| High earners who are worried that this year's Tax Day will be the last one before their rates rise have more than just the White House and DC to blame. They can also look to two academically revered, if publicly obscure, left-leaning French economists whose work is the subtext for the battle over tax fairness. Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have spent the last decade tracking the incomes of the poor, the middle class and the rich in countries across the world. More than anything else, their work shows that the top earners in the US have taken a bigger and bigger share of overall income over the last three decades, with inequality nearly as acute as it was before the Great Depression. Known in Washington and the economics profession by the of-course-you-know shorthand "Piketty-Saez," the two have been denounced on the editorial page of WSJ won mention in White House budget documents. |
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