It sounds like these professors graduated from the redistributive school of economics.

Christopher White of the College Fix reports.

Ninety percent income tax rate would help the rich, economics professors claim

Opposing economist asks why disincentives in carbon tax wouldn’t apply to income tax

Economists at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Bonn argue that the United States would be better off if well-heeled citizens paid the kind of high tax rates not seen since the Eisenhower administration.

According to a working paper by Bonn’s Fabian Kindermann and Penn’s Dirk Krueger published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, going back to the 1950s’ top marginal tax rate of 91 percent could be the elixir to cure the income inequality bug.

Krueger told the Huffington Post a rate “between 85 and 90 percent” makes everybody better off, including people in the 1 percent.

“High marginal tax rates provide social insurance against not making it into the 1 percent,” Krueger said. The Huffington Post said they would primarily fall upon “celebrities, sports stars, and entrepreneurs — people with innate talents that are hugely rewarding, but only for a short period of time.”

If marginal rates are ratcheted sky-high for top earners and low for everyone else, then there is a better than average chance that a typical American will pay very low tax rates, according to Krueger.

Data from a Treasury Department study spanning 1975 to 2005, however, show that the movement between low- and high-income brackets is more complicated than Krueger suggests.

The Treasury study found that taxpayers who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1996 increased their income by 91 percent by 2005, and those in the top 1 percent saw their wealth decline.

The study also found that more than three in four working Americans whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 were in the top 40 percent of income earners by 1991. The data also show that only 5 percent of those initially in the bottom stratum were still there in 1991.

Krueger and Kindermann’s working paper also contends that everybody would be better off if the top marginal tax rate which stands at 36 percent, were increased nearly three-foldn people earning more than $250,000.

Other economists told The College Fix that Krueger and Kindermann’s recommendations would disincentivize entrepreneurism.