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How much of our income goes to Wall Street? Anthropologist David Graeber, a specialist in the study of debt, recently set out to find out how much of an average American income ends up “appropriated” by the financial industry “in the form of interest payments, fees, penalties, and service charges.”

Graebner would quickly find that no government agency is actually compiling all that exact information. But mortgage and consumer interest charges alone, he discovered from Federal Reserve data, are eating up 15 to 17 percent of average household income, and that figure doesn’t include either student loans or “penalty fees” on bank and credit card accounts.

Overall, Graebner estimates, at least one dollar of every five Americans earn is “now likely to end up in Wall Street’s coffers in one way or another.” That’s substantially more than average Americans pay in federal income tax. Maybe we need some “tax reform” on all the levies Wall Street imposes on us.

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Polly Toynbee, a commentator for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, plays a role quite similar to Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who doubles as a New York Times columnist. Both regularly advance well-reasoned — and even inspirational — attacks on the concentration of income and wealth that have left the United States and the UK the world’s two most unequal developed nations.

Both also rate as eminently pragmatic. They champion the politically possible. But we live today in tumultuous times, and that may be why Toynbee last week found herself celebrating a proposal for taxing the rich that rather boldly stretches most anybody’s sense of political practicality.

Why not levy, Toynbee asked, a one-time 20 percent tax on the total wealth of Britain’s richest tenth, a tax “graduated” to ensure that the richest 1 percent pay at a higher rate than households at the bottom of this top 10 percent?

This one-time “windfall taking” tax, Toynbee suggested, could help “save services, save jobs, expunge the national debt, kick-start growth, and set the economy on the road to recovery.”

“The worst ever crisis,” she added, “needs better solutions than any currently on offer for the grim decade ahead.”

The United States, of course, faces that same grim decade. And that makes Toynbee's proposal a matter of more than idle interest. Could a one-time 20 percent levy on the wealth of the rich really make an appreciable difference?

The source of Polly Toynbee’s wealth tax proposal, Glasgow University’s Greg Philo, certainly thinks so. Philo first laid out the proposal last year and even had a national poll commissioned to gauge public reaction. That survey found 74 percent of the UK population approving.

Britain’s richest 10 percent currently hold £4 trillion — about $6.3 trillion — of the UK’s £9 trillion in personal wealth. A 20 percent tax on that £4 trillion would raise £800 billion, enough, says Philo, to “pay off the national debt” and “avoid the need for deep and harmful cuts” in public services.

Philo’s plan anticipates one major objection. Few affluent households have 20 percent of their wealth in readily available cash. They have much of their wealth in property of various sorts that would have to be sold, perhaps at a great loss if all the wealthy had to sell at once.

Not a problem. The wealth tax, under Philo's plan, would not have to be paid all at once. But if a wealthy household wanted to delay payment, that household would have to pay interest on its outstanding wealth tax liability.

“It would be akin,” says Philo, “to a student loan for the rich.”

A 20 percent tax on the wealth of Britain’s richest 10 percent, points out the Guardian’s Polly Toynbee, would essentially “push back downwards the money hoovered upwards in the last decade.”

The billions “hoovered upwards,” Glasgow University’s Philo adds, have largely “been directed into inflated property values.” A wealth tax could recirculate this “dead money” into government expenditures that could stimulate growth.

A one-time 20 percent wealth tax, Philo sums up, “offers a real alternative” that would “move debt off the government's books, using money that is largely trapped in the housing market, from people who will not miss it.”

Could such a wealth tax have a similar impact on the United States? The U.S. numbers — on wealth distribution — make that question a natural. Our richest actually hold a far greater wealth share than Britain’s.

In the UK, the top 10 percent hold 44 percent of their nation’s personal wealth. In the United States, notes an analysis from the Economic Policy Institute released earlier this year, just the top 5 percent held 63.5 percent of the nation’s wealth in 2009. The top 1 percent alone held 35.6 percent.

As of April 2011, NYU economist Nouriel Roubini and two colleagues reported last week, total U.S. household net worth amounted to $56.8 trillion. If we assume that the distribution of U.S. wealth has not changed since 2009, our latest year with distributional figures available, then the top 10 percent today hold 75.1 percent of the nation’s current wealth, or $42.7 trillion.

A 20 percent tax on this wealth would raise over $8.5 trillion, a sum that equals about 85 percent of America's publicly held national debt.

And America’s richest 1 percent? How would they be faring if they had to pay a one-time 20 percent wealth levy? Their average remaining net worth would actually be higher, after adjusting for inflation, than the net worth of America’s richest 1 percent in 1983. Indeed, the top 1 percenters could pay a 25 percent wealth tax and still hold more wealth than their 1983 total.

Our next decade need not be grim. Our next decade does need to be more equal.

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At a moment in U.S. history when the public and members of Congress are searching for new revenue streams that could be invested in ways that help create jobs in this country, a coalition of firms has launched a campaign for a massive tax holiday on overseas corporate profits. The WIN America campaign was formed earlier this year to aggressively lobby for a second tax holiday on repatriated offshore funds.

Last week WIN America succeeded in getting members of the Senate to introduce a bill that would grant a tax holiday on offshore profits.

In 2004, Congress gave them a tax holiday that allowed 843 companies to reduce their tax rate from 35 percent to 5.25 percent on $312 billion in offshore profits.

What did Americans get in return? Last week, our organization, the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, released a report showing that 58 companies that received 70 percent of the tax windfalls didn't boost employment. In fact, they actually destroyed a total of nearly 600,000 jobs.

WIN America has invested $50 million in lobbying Congress for hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks that would flow from a tax holiday. They have hired 42 former congressional staffers who worked for the House Ways and Means Committee or the Senate Finance Committee, the two legislative bodies that write the nation’s tax rules. WIN America is made up of 18 publicly traded corporations and 24 trade associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Fifteen of the eighteen corporations leading the charge for a massive tax holiday on offshore funds under the moniker “WIN America” repatriated a total of $55 billion after the 2004 tax holiday. Among WIN America’s supporters, only one, Brocade Communications, has not announced job cuts since then. One additional firm, Devon Energy, had only minimal layoffs related to an office closing.

The supposedly "one-time" tax holiday in 2004 didn't curb these corporations from continuing to squirrel profits away in overseas tax havens. The offshoring of capital has soared at the 18 WIN America corporations. Collectively they had $54 billion in offshore funds following the 2004 repatriation; today they have $205 billion, a whopping 279 percent increase.

Collectively these 18 corporations stand to save an estimated $61 billion if they pay a tax rate of 5.25 percent, rather than the 35 percent they would otherwise owe.

WIN America Coalition Member Companies

Take Action. Tell your member of Congress that you oppose giving these corporations another "Tax Holliday."

Sens. Kay Hagan (D-NC) and John McCain (R-AZ) have announced plans to introduce a bill tomorrow that would let U.S. companies bring home as much as $1.4 trillion of overseas profits at a steeply reduced tax rate.

However, a new report by the Institute for Policy Studies says this proposed corporate "tax holiday" is unlikely to spur any net job growth. Surprisingly, IPS released its report almost simultaneously with a new paper from the conservative Heritage Foundation that draws the identical conclusion. Tax holidays don't create jobs.

"When Heritage and IPS, two think tanks on opposite ends of the political spectrum, actually agree on something, policymakers should take notice," said Sarah Anderson, a co-author of America Loses: Corporations that Take 'Tax Holidays' Slash Jobs, the new IPS report. "Our solutions to the problem are polar opposites — we want corporations to pay the full existing tax rate while Heritage wants to permanently lower them. But we welcome their honest assessment that the proposed tax holiday will not create jobs."

America Loses shows that most of the companies that snagged a big tax break in 2004, the last time Congress gave them this kind of deal, actually reduced their national and global workforces.

In fact, 58 of the large corporations that took tax holidays after the 2004 congressional action went on to shed almost 600,000 workers. This downsizing didn't stem from recession-linked red ink. These 58 companies today maintain combined cash reserves of more than $450 billion.

Take Action: Tell Your Member of Congress "No Corporate Tax Holidays"

Emily Schwartz Greco is the managing editor of OtherWords, the Institute's national non-profit editorial service.

A powerful coalition of U.S.-based global companies is lobbying hard for a "tax holiday" on offshore profits.

Companies like Google, Apple, Pfizer, and General Electric have parked huge amounts of profits — a stash totaling more than $1.4 trillion —in offshore tax havens. They've stowed those funds abroad primarily to avoid having to pay federal taxes on that income.

But now they want to bring their treasure to the United States, albeit at a steep discount on what they owe the IRS. Instead of paying the statutory corporate income tax rate of 35 percent — or even the "effective rate," which for most global companies, is closer to 11 percent — they're urging Congress to let them do this at a tax rate that's a whisker over 5 percent.

They tell Congress they need a "tax holiday" to free up badly needed capital to invest in right here — creating jobs at a time when the U.S. economy is sputtering.

They've formed a lobby front called the WIN America coalition to make their case, spending over $50 million and hiring over 42 lobbyists that previously worked as staffers on select Congressional tax writing committees. Most GOP members would support any tax cut, even in their sleep, so WIN America has focused its lobbying firepower on Democratic members.

The coalition's corporate lobbyists argue this would be a win-win stimulus for the economy and a low-cost way to growth and jobs that both Republicans and Democrats could support.

The problem with these WIN America promises is this: Their pants are on fire. Here's how we know that: They waged the same campaign in 2004 with the same promises that they would create jobs, got their way, and created few jobs. Worse, some companies destroyed tens of thousands of jobs.

According to a new report that I co-authored, America Loses: Corporations That Tax Holidays Slash Jobs, most of the companies that claimed a tax holiday in 2004 dramatically reduced their national and global workforces.

In fact, 58 of the large corporations that took advantage of the 2004 tax holiday shed almost 600,000 workers in subsequent years. This downsizing was not a result of the economic meltdown as many of these companies prospered. Today, these 58 companies maintain combined cash reserves of more than $450 billion. There's nothing holding them back from investing in America.

These 58 giant corporations accounted for nearly 70 percent of the total repatriated funds and collectively saved an estimated $64 billion from what they otherwise would have owed in taxes. The 10 biggest "layoff leaders" were Citigroup, Hewlett-Packard, Bank of America, Pfizer, Merck, Verizon, Ford, Caterpillar, Dow Chemical, and DuPont.

The corporate flaks will complain that these job loss numbers are exaggerated. We believe they are low, but we won't know for sure until companies that benefit from U.S. tax breaks and subsidies are required to report, in plain language, the number of U.S. employees they have.

Congress shouldn't be fooled again. Limited incentives should go to activities that will create jobs, not another tax holiday for off shore tax dodgers. These companies are not in the business of creating jobs. They are in the business of shifting as much wealth to their top managers and shareholders as possible.

There are other businesses out there — small businesses and domestic companies rooted in local communities that should be the objects of our encouragement and support.

Management guru Jim Collins (no relation) has written about the characteristics of "built to last" companies, businesses that are not "take the money and run" oriented, but are dynamic, growing, and capable of adapting to changing market environments. Built-to-last companies don't play fast and loose with their stakeholders — namely, their employees, shareholders, the communities where they operate, and Mother Earth.

Unfortunately, a segment of corporate America embraces a "built to loot" business model. They shift every possible expense off their balance sheet and squeeze their stakeholders, with the exception of top management and shareholders. They outsource and offshore jobs and engage in accounting gymnastics to game their tax bills to nothing. They mooch from the common treasury, but don't contribute.

Lawmakers should block this fiscally irresponsible and entirely undeserved tax break.

Chuck Collins is a co-author of the new Institute for Policy Studies report, America Loses: Corporations that Take Tax Holidays Slash Jobs. www.ips-dc.org