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Comment by atlantacrackers | Hacker News Reader

because people don't vote purely for self interest. Maybe you are aspirational and want to earn that much some day. Maybe you believe it best for government to be less a part of daily life than more. Maybe you think higher rates will cause successful people to look for lower rate countries to take their talents. Or maybe, you think it is morally wrong for people to vote to grab money lawfully earned from others just because they can.

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> Maybe you are aspirational and want to earn that much some day

Raising taxes on those already making that much makes it more likely, not less likely, that you will be able to do so.

OP stated: Unless you're already making that much, how does a higher marginal tax rate on income over $500k affect you at all?

So, if you want to make that much some day, then it would affect you when you do.

Further - raising rates on high income earners makes it more likely for others to make more? That seems dubious.

One argument in the original article is that an awful lot of that >$500k income is just non-productive rents levied on the lower income brackets anyway, so discouraging wasteful rentier behavior is a net positive (as it reduces inequality) without reducing productivity at all, since rents by definition aren't productive, they just siphon money into top earners' pockets rather than growing the economy at all.

Decreasing rent-seeking in top earners will leave more money on the table for everyone else.

If we're just talking aspirations, if (1-taxes) halves, then I'll just aspire to earn double. Earning 1M a year is almost exactly as plausible as earning 2M a year for the vast majority of people.

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