Afternoon Must-Read: Larry Summers on the Paranoid Fantasies of Venture Capital Zillioniare Tom Perkins

Larry Summers: on The Lead with Jake Tapper: “You got to have some perspective here.

Franklin Roosevelt said of the wealthy, ‘They hate me and I welcome their hatred’; top tax rates on the wealthy in this country in the 1950s were 90%; for most of the Reagan administration, they were well above where they are today; President Kennedy sent the FBI to investigate steel executives because he didn’t like a price increase that took place in the steel industry. Forget talking about Andrew Jackson and the like on where the rhetoric in recent days is, compared to where it’s been through much of our history….

We need a much more inclusive prosperity than we’ve had. And it doesn’t work for the country, it doesn’t work for the legitimacy of our institutions when most of the benefits of economic growth, are going to a very small fraction of the population, people like Mr. Perkins. The right concern for any president, the right concern for any political leader, is with the average incomes of those in the vast middle. On that standard, we’ve got to do better.