× Expand Scott Sonner/AP Photo Senator Elizabeth Warren talks to reporters after a speech in Reno, Nevada, in which she touted economic and environmental policies including a new wealth tax on the nation’s 17,000 wealthiest families, April 6, 2019.

Today’s New York Times came up with a scoop. In a story that ran on the front page, the paper reported that the rich don’t like wealth taxes—which are key platform planks for Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

That said, the rich and their defenders have realized they can’t oppose such a tax on the grounds (however true) that they want still more money, and the power and perks that come with it. Instead, they argue that taxing wealth will curtail the investment that America needs to keep its economy humming.

“You’re going to completely disincentivize capital investment, which is going to be very, very bad for economic growth,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin (a multimillionaire) told the Times. Harvard’s Larry Summers, in an article co-authored with Natasha Sarin of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, argued that “[t]urning the tax code into a vehicle for confronting what some call ‘oligarchic drift’ would undermine business confidence, reduce investment, degrade economic efficiency and punish success.”

Summers, however, didn’t explain how even with massive capital accumulation by the top one-tenth of 1 percent, and without a wealth tax, America had somehow lapsed into the “secular stagnation” he has long contended ails the nation’s economy—an ailment chiefly characterized by a deficiency in capital investment.

Therein lies the rub: In fact, as wealth has concentrated to an unprecedented degree at the tip-top of the economy, investment has correspondingly declined. As one University of Chicago economist has documented, between 1984 and 2014 the share of income going to investment declined by 7.2 percent, the share going to labor declined by 6.7 percent, and the share going to shareholders rose by 13.5 percent. The rich are getting richer, that is, at the expense of investment.

What ails the American economy is underinvestment, both private and public, in productive enterprises and facilities and in its workers. Warren’s and Sanders’ wealth tax proposals are anything but confiscatory—Warren’s calls for a 2 percent tax on wealth in excess of $50 million—but the proceeds from their proposed taxes could kick-start investment in our decaying roads, airports, schools, and grid, and in the new green infrastructure we desperately need.

So: Want investment? Pass a wealth tax.