When one runs out of other ideas, and can't extract money from the bottom 50% of US citizens who do not pay taxes, yet want to continue spending instead of cutting entitlements - treating rich people as another revenue source will continue.
They own dramatically more than their fair share so it all balances out.
If, instead of starting from a vague sense of what feels fair, you instead see wealth as a measure of one's responsibility to a society and look at the actual effects of these various redistributive policies, you get a very different picture. It's often pointed out (including in TFA) that some of the most prosperous, productive periods of American history had extremely high tax rates, but it's amazing when you actually look at the raw numbers for yourself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...
It's baffling to me that faced with this, people continue to push this idea that the key to economic stimulation is tax cuts at the top end.
The next level of "fair" would be everyone paying the same tax rate, like 10% of their income.
Just because a tax can be shouldered by some group doesn't mean it ought to be levied. It's extremely unfair.
Equity is evil. Equality is good.
The point should be to seek an outcome that is good for the society as whole, and that means balancing a lot of different objectives. For example:
- People who are wealthy and successful should enjoy an elevated standard of living.
- Regardless of your birth and other factors outside your control (race, wealth of parents, etc), it should be possible to achieve wealth through hard work.
- No one who works hard should lack basic necessities like food and shelter.
The current system optimizes heavily for the first item at the expense of the other two, and the fact that someone can even propose with a straight face that a flat $1k/year taxation scheme would be "fair" is just a sign of how broken our attitudes around this are.
And if we're talking about fairness if you were always happy with one of these imbalances then it's only fair to accept the second.
Sure there are massive inequalities in the US - but it is not because of "wealthy people". I could suggest it is because of the mainly failings of humans as a barely evolved species to create scaleable entities (businesses) as it requires a huge human effort, skill, luck, and capaiblity to do. Most humans give up on the really hard stuff required to build strategic levers that multiply their monetary outcomes. And instead focus on small ROI skills (monetarily speaking).
I disagree - I believe this is mostly projection. Most wealthy people aren't exorbitantly wealthy. There are 607 billionaires in the US (thats not many). They're not all hiring lobbyists, and trying to corrupt the US. Neither are the deca-millionaires, they're just either building things (businesses to employ others) or getting better at their craft.