Niall Ferguson devotes much of his latest Newsweek column to the closing economic gap between the United States and developing nations, including fast-growing China.
Then he closes with the following observation:
President Obama wants our debate on inequality to focus on taxation. We now know that higher taxes for the rich will be at the top of his second-term agenda. Yet very few economic success stories of the past 30 years have been based on raising direct tax rates. China’s certainly wasn’t.
Talk of class warfare is overblown. Liberia had warfare; America is just having an election. What this election needs now is a grown-up debate on inequality. Republicans could do worse than revive Deng Xiaoping’s most famous slogan: “To get rich is glorious.”
