You said it very well. Our goal should not be to punish the rich by raising taxes on them. We should only raise taxes if it is needed to meet the goal of raising the overall standard of living. The bottom line is that there is almost certainly some money that can be saved by eliminating waste and inefficiencies, and we should all be in favor of taking those steps. But some tax increases will also be necessary, not because higher taxes are a goal, but because they are a necessary tool to reach the goal of higher standards of living for everyone.

Thanks for the comment. We don’t find the two hard to square. Higher taxes isn’t the goal. Raising household income of all is. We are clear that we believe that will require higher taxes to make public investments that matter most to achieving that goal. But we are also open to ideas of how to do that that don’t require raising taxes. Seems to us like a reasonable place to be.

Kind of hard to square with this:

“That said raising taxes is not our goal.”

If you want a broad middle class, you need to tax the wealthy. Dancing around that fact is silly.