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For a long time, there was a predictable response to any proposal for increasing taxes on the rich: It will wreck the economy. You don’t hear this response quite so often anymore, however, because it’s become so obviously false. If anything, the economy in recent decades has grown more quickly when Washington taxes the rich more, not less.

Instead, you often now hear a new argument: There’s no point in trying to tax rich people, because they’ll just figure out a way to avoid paying taxes.

The Washington Post ran a big news article recently making this case (and parts of the argument have appeared elsewhere too, including in The Times). The Post article claimed that Elizabeth Warren’s plan to introduce an annual wealth tax relies on a set of “assumptions that defy a long history of U.S. policymaking”: namely, “that the country’s wealthiest taxpayers won’t find ways to evade the targeted tax hike she proposes.”