It looks as if House Democrats want to create a new tax bracket, for individuals earning $280,000 or more and couples earning $350,000 or more. The rate would be even higher for individuals earning at least $400,000 and higher yet for individuals earning at least $800,000. (The cutoffs for couples would be $500,000 and $1 million.)

My colleague David Herszenhorn has the details in Saturday’s paper.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this proposal is that it would make the tax code more similar to the way it used to be. I wrote a short essay on the history of the tax rates for The Times Magazine this spring. The bottom line:

[Y]esterday’s tax code, unlike today’s, had separate marginal tax rates for the truly wealthy and the merely affluent. For a married couple in 1960, for example, the 38 percent tax bracket started at $20,000, which is about $145,000 in today’s terms. The top bracket of 91 percent began at $400,000, which is the equivalent of nearly $3 million now…. Today, by contrast, the very well-off and the superwealthy are lumped together. The top bracket last year started at $357,700. Any income above that — whether it was the 400,000th dollar earned by a surgeon or the 40 millionth earned by a Wall Street titan — was taxed the same, at 35 percent. This change is especially striking, because there is so much more income at the top of the distribution now than there was in the past. Today a tax rate for the very top earners would apply to a far larger portion of the nation’s income than it would have years ago.

I have no idea whether this proposal will go anywhere. But it’s certainly not a radical one. As David Brooks, another colleague (and fellow member of Club Wagner), wrote in his column on Friday, “To get our overall fiscal house in order, we’re going to need to raise taxes on the rich.”