In the US, anyway, wealth equals power. Great wealth accumulated in few hands shifts a great deal of power over the nation from the populace to those hands. Without some constraint, this poses a real threat to overall freedom and liberty.
Wealth accumulation also means other people does not have this money, with all the problems associated - including a lots of death by suicide.
Many free-marketeer are also against wealth accumulation (+ inheritance) as its gives unfair advantages on the market, ruin the meritocracy...
I don't see a tax that will have a little impact on the lifestyle of the wealthy as an threat to overall freedom and liberty...
This is a feedback loop. If "spend is going up" is somehow justification for cutting welfare programs or for not funding them, how does that fix anything? The ideal would be to have more than enough funding for all your programs, then work on ideal ways to utilize the extra funding. In the end if there's a surplus you can always cut taxes on the rich again, since US lawmakers are constantly trying to do it anyway.
I think if they showed better efficiency and results, the public would be much more inclined to contribute. There's a lot of cynicism from witnessing so much waste and mismanagement.
Something more fundamental needs to be done with corporations and how disproportional the rewards are to the owners/shareholders and the employees themselves. I have no idea what this would actually look like though.
If the government is going to steal my money, I'd like to think that it would go to something like that But in reality it goes to enriching the corrupt bureaucrats and politicians that make the rules and run the systems.
The "freedom dividend" may do some good but it's never going to abolish poverty or fix wealth inequality without lots of big systemic changes. How would giving everyone a fixed amount remotely "solve" wealth inequality when you still have even hundreds of billionaires out there?
If they're really salivating over additional income why aren't taxes increasing? (Other than on the poor, of course)
Want to stop wars? Stop wars, directly. Then once the war expenses are gone, you have way less government spending (we drop an OBSCENE amount of money on the military every year) and you can easily argue that the brand new surplus should be returned to the taxpayer via tax cuts (or via benefits program expansion).
Instead, we have everyone arguing over whether we can "afford" to make university cheaper or get uninsured people onto health plans even though those things are a massive benefit to the people and potentially even cost-neutral. Meanwhile, we cut taxes, to make absolutely sure the only thing we can afford is more wars.
Because a socialist hasn’t been elected President yet. World will wake up when that happens, and will no longer buy your funny money IOUs. When that happens I will happily watch you tear yourselves apart. I’ll be nowhere near this country when that happens.
2. US budgets get a huge new source of Y revenue, to balance current deficits, pay off debts, or fund progressive programs that help the needy.
How is that not helpful? It wouldn't help most HN users, it would help children, the elderly, sick, disabled, etc. It depends on the legislation, you can funnel the funds or you can keep them general purpose.
By definition, the revenue stream will run out. You tax, say, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates until their net worth is exactly $500,000. Then, next year, they make $50,000, so you tax it again and their net worth is now exactly $500,000. Nobody else can ever pass that magic threshold once everybody’s been leveled down to it (unless they play games with offshore accounts in which case you still can’t get it). Now you have progressive social programs that rely on a steady stream of billions of dollars of confiscated wealth and nowhere to get it from.