WATCH: Why We Need To Raise Taxes On The Rich

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

On Sunday’s Up With Chris on MSNBC, David Cay Johnston gave an impassioned explanation of why we need to ask more of the richest Americans, who have flourished while the income of the bottom 90 percent has fallen to a level not seen since the ’60s:

The average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has fallen back to the level of 1966, when Johnson was president. The top 1 percent of the top 1 percent has gone from 4 million to 22 million. In 2010, the first year of the recovery, 37 percent of all the increased income in the entire country went to 15,600 households. We have created a privatized system to redistribute upwards and the reason people at the top are sharing a larger portion of income taxes is because their incomes are growing at an enormous rate, but their burden is falling. To suggest we don’t need to raise more revenue by applying it to people whose success depends on this government and living in this society with rules that make it possible to make that money is outrageous.