On Capitol Hill, Senate Republicans are barreling ahead on a tax bill that will do precisely none of the things they've advertised. Instead of the promised wage-boosting shot of adrenaline into the economy, the bill will almost assuredly blow a ton of money on those who need it the least, while lining the pockets of the corporate class. As I've noted before, the economic rationale for this thing is nonexistent.

But there's a bigger problem too: The entire bill is premised off the belief that taxes are too high and need to go down, when the opposite is actually true.

I know, no one likes to hear that their taxes are too damn low. Democrats are pinning their political case against the current GOP bill mostly on the fact that, eventually, a whole lot of middle-class and lower-income households would see their taxes hiked, due to the phaseouts Republicans included in order to mask some of the bill's deficit effects.

Indeed, it would be a travesty to raise taxes on the middle- and lower-levels of the income scale in order to finance tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations, which are already swimming in cash. Cutting the estate tax, which only affects the very wealthiest households in an attempt to cut down on dynastic wealth, is adding insult to injury.

There's no good reason to hike taxes on anyone if it's to finance tax cuts for the already extremely well-off, which is exactly what the GOP bill does. It's an economic and moral atrocity.

Let's remember, though, that the U.S. is, by developed country standards, a very low-tax country. It raises about a quarter of its gross domestic product in revenue at all levels of government, compared to about a third in the rest of the developed world, and well more than 40 percent in some countries. For the last several decades, the U.S. at the federal level alone has raised roughly 18 percent of GDP in taxes, while spending around 20 percent.

Sorry, but that just doesn't cut it.

As the population ages and lawmakers grapple with the effects automation has on job displacement, more funds at the federal level are going to be an absolute necessity. It's simply not going to be tenable to keep on raising and spending what's raised and spent today. And other countries prove there's plenty of room to raise more revenue without kneecapping economic growth.

The easiest thing to do first is to raise some money on the corporate side. The U.S. used to raise 4-5 percent of GDP in corporate taxes. Today, that's down to 1.6 percent. The corporate income tax once made up about one-third of total U.S. revenue. In 2017, it won't even make up 10 percent. (At the same time, the personal income tax has remained steady, raising 7 or 8 percent in GDP, for about 45 percent of total revenue.)

To be clear, this doesn't mean that the actual headline corporate tax rate needs to go up. In fact, it's entirely possible to lower the rate, but clean out enough of the loopholes, deductions and other trash in the corporate tax code that revenues would go up, which has the added benefit of making the system far more fair. Doing anything to the corporate tax code that doesn't raise more money, at a time when corporate profits are already hovering around all-time highs, would be a colossal missed opportunity.

And then there's rates on the wealthy, which most certainly have room to go up. If it were entirely up to me, rather than hiking what is currently the 39-percent top bracket, I'd add new brackets on top so that multi-millionaires aren't paying the same marginal rate as the upper-middle class. America's concentration of wealth is such that there's plenty of room to raise taxes on the rich with nary an economic blip; in fact, there's a case that income inequality is itself a drag on growth. The top marginal rate used to be above 90 percent, and was at 50 as recently as the 80s, so going higher than today's rate isn't some ahistorical anomaly.

The middle class is, of course, where the politics of tax increases get ugly. But it is possible, as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., does all the time, to make a case that, yes, taxes on the middle class will go up, but that the benefits will be more than worth it. And he's almost certainly right: Things like universal health care or universal child care can be financed in large part by the taxes I mentioned earlier, but probably not entirely. The price at tax time will be more than justified by the product.