This is the reason why american people don't vote for more taxes on the rich, illusion that someday they will be rich too.
working great for the people with money who created this illusion!
working great for the people with money who created this illusion!
The average top statutory rate (federal + state) is 43.7% for 2018, slightly on the lower end of a cluster ranging from Switzerland (41.7%) to Ireland (48%), including places like Germany, Italy, Spain, and the U.K.--which together have 63% of the EU's population. Taxation of rich people in the U.S. is squarely within the mainstream for developed countries with robust welfare states.
Where the U.S. departs is taxes on everyone else. Compare the tax revenue statistics of the U.S. (https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...) with those of Spain (https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-spain...). Spain and the U.S. have almost exactly the same top marginal rate (43-44%). Spain takes in a much larger share of GDP (33%) as taxes versus the U.S. (27%). What is the difference?
- Spain gets slightly less taxes from corporations (7% versus 8%)
- Spain gets less taxes from income taxes, which are progressive (21% versus 40%)
- Spain gets way more taxes from social security contributions, which are regressive because in both countries they are subject to a cap (34% versus 24%)
- Spain gets way more from excise taxes, which are regressive (29% versus 17%)
Imagine if the U.S. wholesale adopted Spain's tax system. Total tax revenues would go up by $1.28 trillion per year. But income taxes, paid primarily by the rich, would fall from $2.1 trillion to $1.37 trillion. Excise taxes, paid primarily by the poor and middle class, would go up from $890 billion to $1.89 trillion. Social security taxes, paid primarily by the middle class, would go up from $1.26 trillion to $2.22 trillion.
Source?
Nearly all the people in the USA would be much more likely to become millionaires if overall taxes were higher for the rich. Less worrying about healthcare, more ability to take business and personal risks, more baseline tools to build ontop of (like roads, etc). Those that want reduced taxes on the rich would be directly harming their own ability to ever become rich in the first place.
Some people are so dead-set against new taxes that even a one penny levy per year to do something vital is too much government overreach.
e.g. "Should I pay to arrest/convict/incarcerate the person who stole my phone" vs. "Should my cancer be cured without bankrupting me"
#1 seems to get universal traction, as does #2 in pretty much every country who could fund it, apart from the US.
I'll clarify a bit, being a millionaire in no way implies that you're rich, inflation is a thing and the vast majority of millennials will be poor.
A common misconception is "somebody has to win, why not me?"
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist."
often misquoted as "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
It doesn't create jobs when the money is taxed away from those who invest in the businesses. High taxes correlate with low economic growth.
> giving all the money
People create wealth, it is not given to them.
> to a few individuals to hold
Wealthy people don't hold money. They invest it. Even money sitting in a checking account isn't actually there - the bank loans it out.
What does government do with the money? The money is only productive in the billionaires bank account?
"People create wealth, it is not given to them." People take wealth, if Bezos has $150B, he didn't create it out of thin air, he took the money out of lots of mom and pop shops that don't exist anymore. Did he actually created jobs or destroyed jobs?
Mostly dissipate it. Your argument rests on the notion that government invests money more productively than wealthy people do. This is pretty hard to support, since the wealthy are wealthy because they are very good at productively investing the money.
Bezos did create his wealth, in large part from the efficiency of getting products to customers, which is why customers preferred to shop at Amazon. They get a better deal.
Bezos created jobs - unemployment rates are very low.
I can't argue with this!