Better solutions are needed.
More to the point, they can hire the best propagandists to spread the idea that it's too hard to tax them and you should do something else.
No seriously, am I wrong? Has taxing the rich ever been successful in the long term?
Take for example the much-lauded United States marginal tax rates of the 1950s. Do your research and you’ll find that the wealthy evaded those taxes quite handily.
I don’t see how it’s possible to get any more blood from that turnip. Better solutions are needed.
[0] https://files.taxfoundation.org/20170804133536/Average-Effec...
I just mailed the feds my owed taxes for 2017; my high earner effective federal tax rate is ridiculously low (lower, because of the cut off for social security at ~120k, than significantly less well paid people).
I didn’t ask for these tax cuts, and they’re certainly not enhancing my propensity to work, they’re just going to allow me to retire earlier.
But if your point is that income taxes aren’t an awesome way to raise revenue, I’m with you. Land-value-taxes would be almost impossible to avoid, and would have the salutory effect of improving efficiency in dense urban areas.
The wealthy are clever, or they can hire some downright clever people to help them. Better solutions are needed.
If rich people want to move out to rural areas to lower their taxes, that’s fine by me.
The main difficulty with land value taxation is deciding what the actual land value is.
Because for some recipients, especially for the non-rich, these are non-repeatable, you do need to add some handling to the regular income tax system to address inconsistent incomes with multi-year smoothing mechanisms to make taxation of those kinds of income fair, but that also makes taxation of variable regular income more fair, too.
When these laws are passed, will assets be sheltered by accountants?
I know a Bitcoin millionaire. He avoided capital gains taxes this year by upgrading his Jeep. The money that would have gone to taxes, he used instead for upgrades, because of a loophole that permits upgrades to be taxed at a much lower rate.
They’re smart, the rich.
The military budget is the elephant in the room that no one will address for fear of appearing as soft or anti-American.
* By the rich, I'm not referring to the doctors, engineers, and lawyers in the upper middle class, I'm referring to billionaires
Capital, like water, takes the path of least resistance. There's ample academic literature which shows and explains international tax competition exists, we can't pretend it doesn't. Any country that increases taxes just signals to the increasingly mobile tax base that they ought to go somewhere else. And tax coordination, i.e. countries agreeing on minimum tax levels, is an incredibly difficult political problem. You're literally putting the heart of a country's budget on the negotiation table, it doesn't get more political.
As such, it's not at all extremely easy to solve. It's not just an issue of integrity, it's also an issue of international politics.
If, say, US would pass laws that allow them to tax everything that touches/ does business with a wealthy individual - that would make it very hard for said individual to avoid taxes (relocation to other countries doesn't help, and avoiding any business with US is impractical). I mean - what I present here is certainly not a "workable idea", but the gist of it should be that "because it was impossible in the past, it's not necessarily impossible in the future".
Who would pass these laws; politicians, right? The same politicians who are influenced by lobbyists, right?
You might then outlaw lobbying but the wealthy would just find another way to bring influence, wouldn’t they?
In the US at least, the rich (top 1%) pay almost 40% of all taxes. Look at the top 10% and it's 71% of all taxes.[1]
Why do you say it's hard to tax the rich?
[1]https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
The fact that the 1% can pay 40% of all taxes and still be wealthy is an indication of how massive inequality is on the US.
So let's see if that's happening...
Top 1% pay 40% of all taxes. How much of total income do they earn? Interesting, only 21%. Looks like they already take on a much higher burden than their income alone would suggest.
The only tax analyzed here is the federal individual income tax, which is responsible for more than 25 percent of the nation’s taxes paid (at all levels of government). Federal income taxes are much more progressive than federal payroll taxes, which are responsible for about 20 percent of all taxes paid (at all levels of government), and are more progressive than most state and local taxes.
Should the top 1% be paying 100% of all taxes? 90%?
If we had a target we'd know how to get there.
So it sounds like you believe the current level of tax take is sufficient and we needn't press for more?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_history_of_the_United...