We hear protests about “class warfare” and warnings not to try to “soak the rich.” But as Warren Buffett has observed: “There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

The infuriating data on tax rates, reported a few days ago by my colleague David Leonhardt, come from a new book, “The Triumph of Injustice,” by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The class warfare against struggling Americans has unfolded in many dimensions aside from tax policy — factory closings and lack of job retraining, corporate greed and irresponsibility, assaults on labor unions, stingy social welfare, mass incarceration and so on — and we’ve seen the results in rising “deaths of despair” from drugs, alcohol and suicide. America’s richest men now live almost 15 years longer than the poorest men — roughly the same gap in life expectancy as exists between the U.S. and Nigeria.

As a society, instead of playing Robin Hood to smooth out the inequities, we’ve played the Sheriff of Nottingham. Lawrence Summers, the economist and former Treasury secretary, has calculated that if we had the same income distribution today as we had in 1979, the bottom 80 percent would have about an extra $1 trillion each year and the top 1 percent would have about $1 trillion less.

Instead, each household at the top has averaged an annual bonus of more than $700,000 a year.

One of the most consequential political debates in the coming years will be whether to raise taxes on the wealthy. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has suggested returning to a 70 percent marginal income tax rate, and both Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed taxes on wealth in addition to income.

Two M.I.T. economists, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, demolish the traditional arguments against higher taxes on the wealthy in an incisive book coming out next month, “Good Economics for Hard Times.” While major league sports teams have salary caps that limit athletes’ pay, Banerjee and Duflo note that no one argues “that players would play harder if only they were paid a little (or a lot) more. Everybody agrees that the drive to be best is sufficient.”