The United States has an highly progressive tax system where the rich pay the vast majority of the taxes. Why isn't that already their "fair share" (a propaganda term)?
I really think this is the future many people behind evangelization of e.g. "AGI" futures are aiming for, with the assumption that well then we'd just have to create some sort of a basic income and everybody would live happily ever after. Of course that rather voluntarily chooses to ignore centuries of evidence to the fact that that's probably not quite what would happen. And even if it did, instead of everybody living happily every you'd instead create a dramatic stratification in society that would, over time, come to make Feudalism look like Communism. People that live only to consume will, over time, come to be marginalized with 100% certainty.
Firing thousands of people should not be the decision of one unelected man. Congress funded those agencies congress has to defund them.
The middle class pay the vast majority of the taxes. The mega-rich pay very little as a percentage of their wealth.
This is objectively false [1].
> The mega-rich pay very little as a percentage of their wealth.
This statement is a very different one than the previous and it’s expected since there’s no wealth tax.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
They don't sign the check, but the costs of tax burdens are often captured in the prices of goods/services offered by rich company owners.
But anyway, lets focus on the low productive people, because that really what is going to bring America out of the rut that it is in. Not the overly powerful rich that are totally screwing the regular joe. You're on another planet bro if you think the problem is the low productivity person and thats what America needs to focus on right now.
Taxing unrealized capital gains is possible, but it's not clear how you'd do this without destroying the entire financial (as opposed to goods/services) economy, since taxing 'wins' without crediting 'losses' makes any margins-game like investing impossible, but billionaires receiving billions of dollars in refunds when the market crashes is probably not visually great. It also seems fairly certain you'd introduce investment hedge possibilities with this, which is also probably undesirable. Not an easy problem.
And of course on top of all of this there's the Norway Problem. [1] Norway decided to introduce a hugely unpopular increase to their wealth tax system. It was expected to increase government revenue by about $146 million per year. Instead it resulted in a loss of about $448 million per year. Make taxation sufficiently onerous and people will simply leave your country. We're not talking about a captive audience, especially in modern times.
[1] - https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2024/09/11/the-failure-of-norw...