These ideas have been met with predictable consternation from conservatives. CEOs and Wall Street-types gathered at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos even had a good laugh when asked about Ocasio-Cortez’s idea.

But raising taxes on the rich isn’t a joke. It’s an economic necessity.

Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 95 percent combined. In every state in the U.S., income inequality has increased since the 1970s; overall, this level of inequality hasn’t been seen since the 1920s. Despite this, taxes on the richest Americans have generally decreased — a trend that was exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

In order to make and maintain the investments America needs in health care, education, infrastructure, and beyond, more revenue simply must be raised. And given the current concentration of wealth in America, raising taxes on the rich is one of the only logical places to start. (Plus, income inequality is demonstrably bad for democracy, as it allows the wealthy to accumulate huge amounts of money that they can then spend in order to elect people just like them or who will be sympathetic to their interests.)

There are plenty of ways to go about raising those taxes on the rich in order to combat these problems, but here are four broad ways to bring some balance back into the tax code.

1. Raise taxes on income.

Unsurprisingly, ultra-wealthy public figures including former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Republican Rep. Steve Scalise (LA), balked at Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion to raise the top income tax rate to 70 percent from its current 37 percent, complaining that this would rob the rich of most of their money. That’s based in a misunderstanding of how marginal tax rates work, because rates do not apply to the entirety of one’s income. In the case of a 70 percent rate on incomes of more than $10 million, it is only the 10,000,001st dollar and beyond that will be taxed at 70 percent. Under the American system of progressive income taxation, everyone pays the same rate on the same dollars, so everybody pays 12 percent on dollars 9,526 to 38,700, 22 percent on dollars 38,701 to 82,500 and on up the income scale.

Ocasio-Cortez and others have also proposed adding additional tax brackets, to separate out the super-duper-rich from the merely super-rich. Today, those making $600,000 or more annually are taxed at the same rate on their wage income as those making millions or billions of dollars, because the code tops out at that 37 percent rate. Ocasio-Cortez envisioned at least one new bracket with a higher tax rate at 10 million, and perhaps more besides.

Contrary to the hue and cry that met Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion, historically, America’s top tax rate has been 70 percent or higher. It’s only since the Reagan administration that today’s levels came into vogue; in the 1950s, for instance, the top marginal rate exceeded 90 percent, a time when economic growth in the U.S. reached some of the highest rates on record.

Applying a 70 percent rate to incomes of more than $10 million would raise about $700 billion over 10 years. That alone would more than cover the cost of SNAP, which provides food for 42 million Americans, for a decade.

2. Raise taxes on investments.

Currently, the most anyone can be taxed on their wage income, which they make from going to work and collecting a paycheck, is 37 percent. However, the peak tax rate on the money made from investments such as stocks (which are known as capital gains) is just 20 percent. Nearly all of the benefits from the lower tax rate on investments flow to the wealthiest Americans, because they make the vast majority of the investment income in the country. The Tax Policy Center estimates that just 4 percent of households in the bottom 80 percent of households will face any capital gains tax from 2018.

While the gap between investment and wage income is supposed to boost economic growth by encouraging the rich to spread their money around, the evidence that it actually does so is thin. The gap does, however, contribute to income inequality in a significant way.

In a recent New York Times op-ed, former Obama administration official Steven Rattner called for raising the capital gains tax to equalize it with taxes on income. As recently as the 1980s, capital gains income and wage income were treated equally, so there’s no reason to think that the current standard is something that can’t change. (Of course, the White House is now mulling over unilaterally cutting capital gains taxes instead.)

3. Raise taxes on wealth.

America currently leads the world in the number of billionaires, who hold about $3.2 trillion in wealth. In 2018, the world’s billionaires increased their collective wealth by $2.5 billion per day. A “wealth tax,” as it’s known, would tax the assets held by the very richest Americans every year. Warren specifically called for applying a 2 percent tax on Americans with assets of more than $50 million, and a 3 percent tax on those who have more than $1 billion.

This is another avenue for addressing the fact that wage income and investment income are treated so differently, but it also gets at the fact that the current tax system allows untaxed benefits to accrue and accrue, and even be passed on from generation to generation, tax free, since the capital gains tax is only levied when assets are sold. Four other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development currently tax wealth in this way, though that is down from 12 in 1990.

In many ways, a tax like this would merely apply to the rich the same rules that already apply to the middle-class, since middle-class wealth is mainly built via property, i.e. homeownership, that is taxed annually.

Warren’s proposal is estimated to raise about $2.75 trillion over 10 years from about 75,000 families. That could cover the 10-year cost of the Children’s Health Insurance Program 17 times.

4. Raise taxes on inheritances.

 The Republican tax bill also raised the exemption on the estate tax – which is levied on inheritances – to $11 million, meaning a married couple can pass on $22 million tax free. During the Clinton administration, the exemption was under $1 million, and was $175,000 as recently as 1981. Lowering the exemption and increasing the top marginal estate tax rate, which currently stands at 40 percent, would not only raise billions of dollars in revenue but reduce the ability of the richest families to entrench income inequality via handing vast fortunes on to the next generation. (Congressional Republicans are currently calling for the estate tax to be repealed entirely, which would only benefit 2 out of every 1,000 families. For the same price, Congress could literally buy everyone in America a pony.) 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Thursday intends to release a plan to lower the estate tax exemption to $3.5 million and add several new brackets, including a 55 percent rate on inheritances of more than $50 million and a 77 percent rate on those of more than $1 billion.

Also, doing away with what’s known as step-ups on inheritance, as the Obama administration proposed, would be beneficial. Under current law, when an asset is bequeathed to someone else, the increase in value is never taxed. Instead, the inheritor simply gets to start counting his or her own increase from the value on the day the asset was inherited. (As an example, if your grandfather bought stock for $2 per share, then passed it to you when it cost $10 per share, you never have to pay the tax on that $8 increase.) Closing this loophole could raise more than $600 billion over 10 years, enough to cover the cost of the entire Pell Grant program, which sends more than 20 million low-income students to college every year, 1.5 times for that decade.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of ways to increase revenue from the richest Americans, of course. But any of them is a start. And for any member of the 1 percent who might balk at paying higher tax rates, just remember: It beats getting eaten.

The highest-profile spat has been between Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, the former of whom gave millions of dollars to the campaign to pass Proposition C, while the latter has derided the initiative as “quick acts to make us feel good for one moment in time.”

But this debate isn’t really about tech companies and the political preferences of their wealthy CEOs. Proposition C is about our priorities at a time when wealth and power are more concentrated in America than they have been in decades.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Were Proposition C to pass, taxes would increase for 300 or so of the city’s biggest businesses, raising $250-$300 million  for homelessness supports. (Last year, the city spent $380 million on homelessness programs, so this proposal would increase that funding by at least 65 percent.) At least half of the new funds must be dedicated to permanent housing, which research shows is the most effective way to combat homelessness, with the remainder split between mental health care, shelters, and prevention efforts.

“The idea is simple. It’s about taxing our largest and wealthiest corporations and redistributing that to our most vulnerable communities,” said Sam Lew, policy director at the Coalition on Homelessness. “The everyday San Franciscan won’t be impacted by this tax. It’s really those who are making the most profit and asking them to pay their fair share and give back to the community.”

If this sounds somewhat familiar, that’s because it is. Seattle’s city council passed and then rescinded a corporate tax to bolster funding for homelessness prevention in April, backtracking after the city’s biggest companies — and most prominently Amazon — objected and threatened to put a direct vote over the issue onto the ballot in November. Amazon also halted a construction project in the city during the dispute, threatening to blunt its economic activity if the tax remained in place.

“I and other people out on the streets have reached the conclusion that this is not a winnable battle at this time. The opposition has unlimited resources,” said one city council member who voted first for the tax and then for its repeal.

A similar dynamic is at play in San Francisco ahead of November’s vote. The threat from big businesses, such as Square, Lyft, Stripe and the others who have donated to a “No on C” campaign,  is that Proposition C would kill jobs or deter companies from coming to the Bay Area without solving the homelessness problem. However, a report from the city controller found that were the tax enacted, there would only be 725-875 fewer jobs in the city over the next 20 years, amounting to just 0.1 percent of total employment, while the measure would provide housing for thousands of people.

One of the selling points for Proposition C campaigners is that the measure would simply offset some of the tax benefits that corporations received in 2017 courtesy of the Trump administration and conservatives in Congress. It would also begin to counteract some of the vast under-investments that the federal government has made in affordable housing funding since the Reagan administration, says Lew.

“Because of that huge divestment in public housing, there’s been an increase in homelessness across the United States and there hasn’t been a reinvestment in that in the last 30-35 years,” she said. “What we’re saying in San Francisco is that we’re going to be leaders in providing housing for people who need it. We’re actually going to spend the money that we need to spend to house people.”

San Francisco has about 7,500 people who are homeless, according to the latest data, which is almost certainly an undercount due to the inherent difficulties in accessing the homeless population. People experiencing homelessness in San Francisco are also disproportionately people of color or members of the LGBTQ community, per the city’s most recent survey.

Homelessness in both San Francisco and the U.S. has risen in recent years for many reasons, but one of them is growing economic inequality. In California and San Francisco in particular, that inequality is boosted in no small part by the presence of America’s tech titans. Plenty of research has shown that tech clustering is responsible for the growing wage gap in big cities, and for the divergence between wages in those cities and elsewhere. And that clustering didn’t happen completely organically: San Francisco provided tax breaks to tech companies that settled in the city, with one known as the “Twitter tax break” saving companies $34 million in 2014 alone.

Tech workers, especially at the richer end of the income scale, have seen their incomes rise in California. However, everyone else hasn’t been so fortunate:  According to a recent report, wages for 90 percent of California workers are lower than they were 20 years ago.  There’s also no shortage of stories about other inequalities in the Bay Area, on everything from food to transportation to education.

Even a decent paying job is no guarantee of affordable housing, thanks in part to the tech-industry driving gentrification and increased housing prices in California’s major cities. Average rent in San Francisco varies depending on how it is calculated, but many analyses place it above $3,000 per month. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, renting a modest two-bedroom home in the city requires a wage of more than $60 per hour.

These figures, not which tech CEO said what on Twitter, get at the essence of Proposition C. The only question that really matters is: Will San Francisco will ask its wealthiest corporations to pay slightly more so that thousands of currently homeless people can have a roof over their heads?

“We’re on this national platform now because two CEOs of tech companies are fighting about whether it should be passed,” said Lew. “But at the end of the day we’re fighting for a measure that’s going to save lives regardless of what billionaires are thinking.”

So now it’s time for the coup de grace: An amendment enshrining those tax breaks for the state’s wealthiest residents into the state constitution.

In November, North Carolina residents will be voting on a ballot initiative that would amend the state’s constitution to cap its income tax at 7 percent, down from a current cap of 10 percent. Considering that North Carolina’s income tax currently tops out at 5.499 percent, and is scheduled to fall further to 5.25 percent next year, that may not seem like a big deal. But it is.

First, the background. The change to a flat tax helped those at the top of the income scale, who saw their rates drop the most. Along with a host of other tax cutting measures, including a corporate income tax reduction, it cost the state a big chunk of money.

Get Talk Poverty In Your Inbox

“Since 2012, when Republicans took full control of the legislature and governorship for the first time in modern history, they’ve been on a tax cutting rampage,” said Meg Wiehe, a North Carolina native and deputy director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. “The state will be about $3.6 billion shorter in revenue than it would have been otherwise, which is a pretty significant difference in a state with a general fund of just around $21 billion.”

By pushing a cap on the income tax into the Constitution, lawmakers hope to lock those reductions in, making future legislators go through the same long amendment process in order to raise taxes or add progressivity back into the code. (Amendments to the North Carolina constitution are placed on the ballot via a three-fifths vote of both houses in the state legislature and require approval by voters, whereas legislation can be passed by a simple majority of lawmakers.)

As recently as 2013, the top income tax rate in North Carolina was 7.75 percent, so it’s not out of the question that lawmakers would want to implement an increase from today’s levels. Even setting the cap at 7 percent was a compromise of sorts among the Tar Heel State’s Republicans: Many wanted to cap the income tax at its current level, or even below that, forcing a constitutionally-mandated tax reduction.

A cap poses several problems, in addition to the simple unfairness of leaving such a low tax rate on the wealthy in a state where more than 100 percent of the income gains since 2009 have gone to the richest 1 percent of the population (meaning those at the other end of the income spectrum actually lost ground). For starters, it could undermine important state investments, as Alexandra Forter Sirota, director at the North Carolina Justice Center’s Budget and Tax Center, explained.

“To maintain current service levels for our population, we won’t have enough revenue under our tax code in 2019,” she said. “So they’ll have to either cut services or raise revenue or some combination of both.” And those cuts tend to fall disproportionately on low-income communities and people of color, she said, as will potential revenue raisers if the state has to resort to fees or sales taxes in lieu of being able to raise income taxes.

Already, that dynamic has been evident in the state. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted recently, spending on public colleges in North Carolina is still nearly 20 percent below where it was before the 2008 recession. Previous rounds of tax cutting have made it so that North Carolina can’t raise K-12 education funding, which is already among the lowest in the nation.

This problem will be magnified when another economic downturn inevitably comes. “There have been key times even in recent history when the state, in an emergency situation, has relied on the wealthiest taxpayers to pay more to help ensure that critical services don’t have to be deeply cut,” explained Wiehe. “Future lawmakers who maybe would prefer to use the income tax as their tool wouldn’t have that available to them.”

Case in point, the state enacted a temporary top tax rate of 8.25 percent on the state’s richest residents in response to the Great Recession – helping to preserve funding for public schools and public health programs like the Children’s Health Insurance Program – a  move which would be rendered much more difficult if lawmakers needed to spend time getting voters to approve a new amendment.

North Carolina has been a political battleground in recent years, the quintessential “purple” state that is home to the weekly Moral Mondays march, but with a state legislature controlled by conservatives. In addition to the tax cap, voters there will be assessing amendments that would restrict voting rights and remove some of the (currently Democratic) governor’s powers. Locking in tax cuts for the wealthy fits right in.

According to a recent Elon University poll, 56 percent of North Carolinians support the tax cap amendment as written, with 15 percent opposing it. However, after being provided an explanation that includes the amendment’s possible adverse effects, the gap falls to 45-27. That has Sirota optimistic that voters grasp what’s at stake.

“I think that North Carolinians are incredibly smart about this issue right now,” said Sirota. “They understand that since 2013 the vast majority have not seen a big difference in their taxes, but they have seen their communities struggle with having to figure out how to meet needs.”

But while Winner-Take-All Politics got a lot of attention, the media missed a crucial part of the book: Rising inequality comes at a high cost to individual workers. In the book, Hacker and Pierson presented calculations showing that if inequality had stayed constant from 1979 to 2006, the bottom 90 percent of Americans would make up to 36 percent more per year than they currently do.

Get TalkPoverty In Your Inbox

Half a decade later, inequality is still growing. It also still isn’t getting the media attention it deserves, even though it’s making a massive impact on Americans’ lives. It’s like climate change: There is nothing “new” about growing inequality, so it gets pushed out of the news in favor of White House scandals and presidential tweets. But just like global warming, economic inequality is slowly but surely destroying the livelihoods of many Americans.

You can see this quite clearly when you look at how the distribution of household income has changed over the past 50 years. I extended Hacker and Pierson’s original calculations to include incomes from 1968 to 2015, giving us about two decades’ worth of additional data beyond other recent calculations. The wider timeframe shows an even deeper decline in income than the authors originally reported.

The table below breaks this down by income bracket. The second column shows what each group’s average household income was in 2015; the third column shows what the group’s average income would have been if inequality had stayed the same between 1968 and 2015.

Source: Author’s calculations based on 2016 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

If it weren’t for the increase in inequality, the bottom 40 percent of households would be making more than 35 percent more today.

The gains, of course, have gone to the very wealthiest Americans—especially those in the top 5 percent. Due to the rise in inequality, higher-income households—those in the top 20 percent of the income distribution but not in the top 5 percent—have seen a 9 percent increase in their annual incomes. But incomes for households in the top 5 percent are 26 percent higher—an increase nearly three times as great. This reveals something important about the nature of rising inequality: The “winners” from increased inequality are really a small group of incredibly rich Americans, who are taking increasingly large shares of the total national income.

The findings are pretty difficult to refute. Conservatives have long argued that household income statistics are unreliable because they fail to account for differences in household size. But the increase in inequality appears just as real even when we look at “equivalence-adjusted income shares,” which control for differences in household size and composition.

In fact, the figure below shows that households in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution have actually seen their share of national income decline more when we use the equivalence-adjusted household income that addresses conservatives’ concerns.

The poorest fifth of households saw their share of national income decline from 4.2 percent in 1968 to 3.1 percent in 2015, a drop of 1.1 percentage points. However, if we instead look at equivalence-adjusted income, their share of the national income dropped more than twice as much (from 5.8 percent to 3.4 percent, a drop of 2.4 percentage points). Conservatives are right to say that normal household income statistics can be misleading; but that’s because the normal statistics understate the rise in inequality, not because they overstate it.

The rise in inequality is no statistical mirage. It is undoubtedly real—and its effects have been pernicious. Our country’s poorest households lose more than $4,000 every year as a result of the growth in inequality; lower-income families lose more than $11,000; and middle-class families lose around $13,000. That money could pay for real things that families have to do without, whether it’s better food or new shoes, a trip to the doctor or a great summer camp.

If the rise of economic inequality is going to be the great untold story of our time, then reducing inequality should be the greatest progressive objective of the 21st century.