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The Activist Beat with Rose Aguilar, host of Your Call on KALW in San Francisco is a weekly roundup of progressive activism that the mainstream media ignores, undercovers, or misrepresents.

You know things are bad when members of the 1% are asking Congress to raise their taxes. That’s what happened last Wednesday in Washington. Twenty-one members of the group Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength met with politicians from both parties with a strong message: let the Bush tax cuts expire once and for all and raise our taxes.

According to facts on the Patriot Millionaires’ website, letting tax cuts for the top two percent expire as scheduled would pay down the debt by $700 billion over the next 10 years.

And then there are the tax rates: in 1963, millionaires had a top marginal tax rate of 91 percent; in 1976, it was 70 percent; today, it’s 35 percent.

In a letter to the so-called Super Committee, Democratic Senator Harry Reid, and Republican Congressman John Boehner, the Patriotic Millionaires wrote that the tax rate for those making over $1 million a year should be at least 39.6 percent. They also said private jets shouldn’t have been tax deductible in the first place.
Reducing the income tax on top earners is one of the most inefficient ways to grow the economy, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office
So who’s listening?

Guy Saperstein, a former civil rights attorney and member of the Patriotic Millionaires, said the most telling and disturbing conversation took place in Democratic Senator John Kerry’s office. What was supposed to be a 25-minute conversation turned into a 75-minute somewhat heated conversation.

When the group told Senator Kerry that it’s time to raise the top marginal tax rate for millionaires, Kerry tried to sell them on the idea of dropping the top tax rate from 35 percent down to 28 percent. He said that’s the only way Republicans would agree to a deal and raise revenue. Saperstein said he was stunned.

According to the National Priorities Project, the first decade of the Bush tax cuts, from 2001 – 2010, cost $955 billion; the Obama extension, from 2011 – 2012, cost $229 billion. Between 1979 and 2007, incomes for the wealthiest one percent of Americans rose by a whopping 281 percent.

Patriot Millionaires for Fiscal Strength isn’t the only group of wealthy individuals calling for more progressive tax policies and an end to the Bush tax cuts.

Members of Responsible Wealth, a network of over 700 wealthy individuals, support a financial transaction tax. They’re also calling for an end to corporate tax loopholes and offshore tax havens.

Resource Generation, an organization for young people with wealth who are committed to social change, is also calling on Congress to let the Bush tax cuts expire. They’ve been active in Occupy movements across the country.

Resource Generation started the blog, ‘We are the 1 percent: We stand with the 99 percent.’ The blog says, “Tax me! I support proposals to raise taxes for wealthy households like my own. No budget cuts until we raise revenue from those of us who have benefited the most and have the greatest capacity to pay.”

You have to wonder. If millionaires can’t convince politicians to let the Bush tax cuts expire and raise the marginal tax rate back to Clinton-era levels, then who can?