Don't Mess With Taxes

Around two dozen millionaires will be in Washington, D.C., today with a special message for the deficit reduction super committee: Tax us!

The members of Patriotic Millionaires, a political activist group of, according to their website, "loyal citizens who now or in the past earned an income of $1,000,000 per year or more," kick off the day with a meeting with the Congressional Progressive Caucus and a press conference.

From there they'll fan out on Capitol Hill for face-to-face talks with legislators and their staffs.

They plan to talk with most of the members of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. Also on the agenda are meetings with some Tea Party Caucus members.

"We felt it was critical to talk to both sides," Erica Payne, one of the organizers of the lobbying day, told The National Journal.

And what exactly will these current and former wealthy individuals tell Congress? That higher taxes on the wealthy should be a part of any plan the super committee must finalize by Nov. 23.

If the deficit panel isn't willing to hike taxes on the wealthy, the Patriotic Millionaires want the top tax rate for the highest earners, now at 35 percent through 2012, to return to 39.6 percent. It was during the debate in late 2010 about extending the Bush-era tax cuts that the millionaires' group was formed.

Following up on earlier letter: The Washington lobbying day follows a letter the group sent this summer to Republican leaders whom the millionaire's tax advocates say "refuse to even consider raising taxes on people making more than one million dollars per year."

"Today, we seem to be immersed in a Second Gilded Age and a 'cult of wealth' in which everything in society, politics, popular culture, (and yes, tax cuts) is by, of, and for the top 1 percent," reads the Patriotic Millionaires' letter.

"You and your political colleagues are the principal proponents of trickle-down and the cult of wealth -- despite the overwhelming accumulation of knowledge in all social scientific fields (including the economics field) linking wealth inequality with every social pathology and dysfunction in modern society, and despite the fact that the history of world civilization has shown such societies to have only one inevitable -- and bad -- end."

Millionaire Dollar Facts courtesy Patriotic Millionaires.
Click image for a larger view.

You also might find these items of interest:

• Many members of Congress could pay more taxes
  if Buffett Rule is enacted
• Millionaires support paying higher taxes
• Who wants to tax a millionaire?