> its designed that way to benefit the wealthy
"Design" implies intent requiring coordination and effort on the part of a group of people strategically situated to deliver a result. "To benefit the wealthy" identifies a clear and well-defined objective as the focus of such activities.
Who came up with the original idea to "design" a tax code "to benefit the wealthy"?
Was it more than one person? Names please.
What were the design principles? No hand-wavy stuff, looking for specific objectives, etc.
Over what period of time?
Can you provide a year-by-year (or close enough) summary of the progression of this design and how it met your stated purpose?
How? By this I mean: How was such a coordinated effort organized and run over, presumably, decades and through various generations of politicians participating in the process.
And, for all of the above, documentation please.
I remain puzzled about whether people just stay stuff like this or actually believe it. You don't have to make too much of an effort in digging into these ideas to fully identify them as nonsensical. Yet people believe this stuff without having one shred of proof, evidence, history or documentation. Not very different from folks who believe the COVID vaccine injects you with tiny little robots the government can use to control you (one of the things people say and I don't really know how to react other than to shrug and wish them well).
I'll add my own observation to this: No, the US tax code is not designed to benefit the wealthy. It is based on incentivizing behavior through tax breaks/credits.
For individuals the simplest example is the ability to deduct your mortgage interest from your income. Another example is the 30% solar system tax credit (I think it's down to 26% now).
At the business level you get such things as Section 179 tax credits, which allow you to reduce your tax burden by as much as 100% of the purchase value of qualifying business property. For example, when we purchased our last Haas CNC vertical machining center and all the tooling and software required to design, program and run it, we got a Section 179 tax credit of nearly $250K.
The theory behind these incentives is to promote behaviors. We bought equipment. The tax code treats this as a desirable behavior because it creates jobs. The options were: Send the IRS a check for $250K or send them $0 and use that money to buy additional machining capabilities. This is what is called a "no brainer". Everyone wins.
This is why businesses can seem to pay zero taxes. Well, if they invest enough money into things the tax code wants them to put money into, they get to pay less taxes. Yet, in certain circles, this is treated with blinding ignorance; the headlines often reading company "x paid zero taxes". Nobody bothers to understand any of it.
For the record, I don't like the idea of using the tax code to control behavior. I think this is (was) a terrible idea. It gives politicians tools they should not be able to access. Taxation should be as simple as possible, to a limit. The problems start once you try to simplify it. For example, "You must pay 10% of your income". OK, someone sets up an LLC and pay themselves very little. They pay very little in taxes. This is a very simplistic example to say that one of the reasons for which the tax code quickly gets convoluted is because, in software developer terms, it has to be a massive chain of "if-else if" statements in order to address all permutations and limit cheating to the extent possible. Once you start down that path you end-up with never-ending complexity because we don't have a way to control it.
Perhaps a simpler approach would have no income tax at all for anyone (state of federal). All the money needed to run governments at various levels comes from taxing transactions. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of options here. For example, tax every electronic funds transfer; tax every single imported good; national VAT, etc. Not a simple idea. There are no simple options. Maybe that's my point. It wasn't designed to benefit the rich, it turned into a monster that requires more and more "if else-if" statements to be added every year because we find more and more conditions that require evaluation. It's crazy. Not sure what they right answer might be. Not sure there is a right answer at all. And, no, what they do in (country) "m" has no bearing whatsoever on what is done or should be done in any other country. Tax codes evolve almost like natural selection, they respond to evolutionary pressure and each makes sense (to the extent possible) within the nation it evolved from.