Morning Must-Read: Matt O’Brien: President Obama Finally Has His Piketty Moment

…on rentiers, their heirs, and the big banks to pay for $175 billion of tax credits that will reward work… fighting a two-front war against a Piketty-style oligarchy where today’s hedge funders become tomorrow’s trust funders… trying to slow the seemingly endless accumulation of wealth among the top 1, and really the top 0.1, no actually the top 0.001…. And…trying to help the middle help itself by subsidizing work, child care, and education….

End the step-up [at death of] basis for capital gains…. Raise the top capital gains tax rate from 23.8 to 28 percent…. Tax the big banks for being big…. Subsidize middle-class work… a second-earner tax credit of $500… calling for the Earned Income Tax Credit to be doubled for childless workers, to try to get more young men in particular into the workforce… college tax credits to be streamlined, extended, and expanded… automatically enrolling [workers] in an IRA….

These are ideas, to be honest, that some Republicans support…. The question, then, isn’t how to help the middle class. It’s how to pay for it. Obama wants to make the top 1 percent and Wall Street do so. Republicans don’t. That, like every other one, will be what the 2016 election is about.