Why is taxing high earners more a good idea? It just gives people an incentive to either not make that much money or leave the country to make more money.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-bur... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/sweden-competitive-spite-high-tax-... [3] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-09/bernie-sanders-wants-...
Anecdotally a lot of those same people are 1st generation immigrants, 2nd generation children of recent immigrants or are merely here for school from places such as China in the first place, and as such don't feel much of a tie to Canada or to being Canadian.
Not to mention that Canada, at least in the major English-speaking cities, does not have much of a residual sense of community left.
Hence the situation is very different to a largely homogeneous society with an inherent sense of shared identity such as Sweden.
That's not what I said at all. I said Canadians are leaving Canada because they can make more money outside of Canada(ie. like close to double the salary in some cases). Raising taxes is not going to encourage them to stay if they are leaving because of monetary reasons.
If you make enough money that you can live comfortably and you would have to move up a lot to counter the offset to make more money in the next tax bracket, I think the majority of people would not bother. Outside of HN, a lot of people are satisfied with making an okay salary and having steep tax bracket changes just amplifies that. Obviously, everyone would like to make more money if they could do so easily but if it is very difficult to do so, a lot of people will not be bothered.
The people who do want to make a lot of money and become rich, well if they have to deal with crazy taxes, they are going to either find away around the tax laws, or simply leave the country which both options are not good for the country.
The people in the middle income brackets don't want to move up, in the sense that they don't want to work 20% harder, to get a 3% increase in their paycheck. (Which is how most employers 'reward' hard work.)
That's because effort and remuneration aren't linked in a 1:1 fashion, not because the marginal tax bracket for the next dollar they earn is three percent higher than the previous one.
This is not how tax brackets work.
No, but the Swiss banking system, Panama Papers, Canadian shadow company situation et al. can attest to the fact that when income / wealth rises to a certain level and those who've earned / attained it feel the level of tax being levied at them is of an unfair level, a vast amount of money that could be taxed will be off-shored.
Everyone, particularly those in areas with a low sense of shared identity and the mutual obligations that comes with it, will try to minimize their tax bill some way or another and once one attains a certain level they will unlock mechanisms to avoid tax at a level that will be detrimental to the rest of the players in their given system.