Neil Brooks (Osgoode Hall Law School) presents The Case for Progressive Taxes: One More Time, with Feeling at the University of Toronto today as part of its James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series. Here is the abstract:

This presentation will review the central arguments made in a book I co-authored with Linda McQuaig, The Trouble with Billionaires (2010): inequality matters; income and wealth have become dramatically more concentrated at the very top over the past three decades; this increase in the concentration of income and wealth was not the inevitable result of technological change and increased globalization, but was the result of political decisions (and indecisions); there is no theory of distributive or moral justice that would justify these increasing top incomes; this increasing inequality imposes social, economic and political costs on society and diminishes the quality of life of its citizens; the pursuit of a more equal society is not inconsistent with high levels of material well being; and, the tax system is a necessary and appropriate policy instrument for achieving a more socially acceptable distribution of income and wealth.