The wealthy are feeling defensive about their taxes. Most Americans may think the rich pay too little but, not surprisingly, only 30 percent of the rich agree. More than two-thirds of families earning a quarter of a million dollars a year or more tell Gallup’s pollsters that their taxes are too high.


It is true that high-income Americans carry the biggest tax burden. While fewer than 1 in 20 families make more than $200,000, they pay almost half of all federal taxes.


However they feel about the tax man, there is a case to be made that they can pay much more. The reason has nothing to do with fairness, justice or ideology. It is about economics and math.


The math is easy: the federal budget over the next decade cannot be made to square without raising a lot more money. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that if we stay on our current path, federal debt held by the public will grow from about two-thirds of gross domestic product today to roughly 100 percent in a decade and twice that much by 2040. It is unlikely that even the most committed Republicans could reverse the trend without higher taxes.


But an equally compelling reason relies on a new understanding of the economics of taxation. For 30 years, any proposal to raise taxes had to overcome an unshakable belief that higher taxes inevitably led to less growth. The belief survived the Clinton administration, when taxes rose and the economy surged. It survived George W. Bush’s administration, when taxes were cut yet growth sagged.


But now, a growing body of research suggests not only that the government could raise much more revenue by sharply raising the top tax rates paid by the richest Americans, but it could do so without slowing economic growth. Top tax rates could go as high as 80 percent or more.


Admittedly, it seems inconceivable that our political system could stomach a tax increase that big. Today, the richest 1 percent of Americans pay a top federal rate of 29 percent, according to Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. That’s because almost a third of their income derives from capital gains and dividends — which are taxed at a 15 percent rate — while the rest is ordinary income taxed at a top marginal rate of 35 percent.


Nonetheless, the research suggests there is much more money available to close the budget deficit than we previously thought, if only we were willing to raise tax rates to where they were back in the early ’70s, in the administration of Richard M. Nixon.


Taxpayers always want to pay less to the tax man. Still, there’s nothing inevitable about low taxes. In the early 1950s, coming out of World War II, the top federal income tax rate exceeded 90 percent. In 1980, the top marginal rate was 70 percent for families making more than $215,400 — about $587,000 in current dollars. And these families pocketed a much smaller share of the nation’s income than they do now. Today, people earning over $200,000 a year capture more than a third of national income.


How we got from that country to this one — where President Obama’s attempt to raise the top federal rate to 39.6 percent from 36 percent sets off partisan warfare — had less to do with changing beliefs about fairness than with politics. By the mid-1970s, the Republican Party concluded it was probably more effective to counter Democrats’ Big Government platform as the party of low taxes than as the party of budget discipline.


Economics helped them make their case. The sharp fall in tax rates that brought us to where we are today was buttressed by an economic proposition that has guided policy ever since: that raising taxes could backfire and harm the economy along the way.


Legend has it the idea entered the political mainstream during a meeting in Washington in 1974 in which the economist Arthur Laffer demonstrated the principle to Donald Rumsfeld, chief of staff to then-President Gerald Ford, and Dick Cheney, an assistant to the president. He drew a curve on a cocktail napkin — now known as the Laffer curve — to illustrate how tax revenues would increase less and less as tax rates rose until they reached a point where any future increase reduced the amount of money raised.


If taxes were too high, Mr. Laffer argued, people would come up with ways to avoid or evade them. They might postpone or cancel investments if the government were to tax away a large share of the rewards. They might work less, or put less effort into it. In this way, high taxes could reduce the total tax haul. More worryingly, this behavior would ultimately slow economic growth.


Economists today broadly accept this understanding of people’s actions. This belief has supported big declines in tax rates around the developed world, from Japan to Britain and the United States to Sweden.


But something got lost in the rush to cut: the proposition does not support low taxes all the time, for everybody and at all costs. While raising tax rates beyond a certain threshold can reduce tax revenue, we don’t know where the peak is. After decades of tax cuts, it is not unreasonable to think we are way below it. And though raising taxes will change taxpayers’ behaviors in a way that could reduce economic growth, we don’t know precisely how much. It turns out the impact of raising tax rates on the rich may be smaller than we thought.


The British went out of their way to shield income from the taxes after the Labour government raised the top income tax rate to 50 percent from 40 percent in 2010. High fliers asked for accelerated bonuses to get the money before the new tax rate went into effect. Then, they postponed income, hoping Labour would be kicked out of office. More than a thousand people moved to Switzerland.