Those mandates persist because people don't want flat, and flats tend to be low quality.
There needs to be a change of perception, expectations, and better flats.
There needs to be a change of perception, expectations, and better flats.
Developers would far rather build a couple of "Exclusive Modern Mansions" rather than two blocks of four three bedroom flats. They make more money, but create far less value.
If the market structure doesn't allow reaping profit proportional to the value you create, the less profitable thing doesn't get done, even if it creates more value for society. It's a market failure.
The implications of that for progressive personal income taxation are left as an exercise for the reader. They're usually not explored for ideological reasons.
I don't think there are any. An individual doesn't get to choose between a high tax job and a low tax job. The only way to get more money in your pockets is to get paid more money, regardless of whether you're taxed at 15% or 50%.
Sure, I agree with you on that. You have to consider the effects on an additional unit of effort put in at that job. Progressive taxation sets up steeply diminishing returns on that marginal effort. And incentives to spend that effort on alternatives with better returns, like shopping for tax-sheltered investments. Because a salary's not the only income professionals have. So you can effectively make tradeoffs between revenue streams with different tax rates, one of which happens to be your job.
This clearly disincentivizes creating additional value for society through an additional unit of effort at that job, and it's a result of market structure.
And it's likely that whatever they're doing to get money should simply be counted as income too.
> This clearly disincentivizes creating additional value for society through an additional unit of effort at that job
Whatever they do instead might create less value for society, or it might create more value for society. I have no idea what the average is.
Also we have to look at the opportunity cost. By taxing one person with a huge income more, you can tax dozens of people with lower incomes less. In most cases that's a huge boon for society.
> Progressive taxation sets up steeply diminishing returns on that marginal effort.
Steeply? Bah. When you're talking about millions of dollars, removing 37 percent (or 50 or 70) still leaves an enormous incentive.
The thing that actually causes significant diminishing returns is that every dollar you earn benefits your life less than the previous dollar.
I never meant millions of dollars. This argument applies to middle class incomes too.
Thus we ought to massively increase taxation on the highest earners in order to rebalance our economy.