I offer up that we collect unpaid taxes ($250B). Then we increase the highest tax bracket to 90%. Then we get a progressive capital gains tax. That should pay out trillions.
Otherwise they will use their power to get rid of safeguards and government assets to essentially buy the governments power and assets.
If you want to significantly increase revenue, you'd have to tax the middle class harder.
I'm not automatically against taxing high income people, but the top 10% ALREADY pay 76% of federal personal income taxes.
Like... samesies, I guess? This is an irrelevant stat without more context. It says nothing useful as-is, and even if that were fixed, it'd be of limited use because it concerns only personal income taxes. But you're presenting it as if it means something.
This kind of thing is what got you the comment you're responding to.
Right, which comes out to, oh I don't know... say, 0 dollars if you're a billionaire?
These people have no income, they have wealth. The wealth is completely untaxable so long as it remains wealth. Which you can do, because the benefit of having wealth is you're given liquid money just by virtue of having that wealth. Meaning, you can infinitely take out loans and use said wealth as collateral. Probably your wealth is growing faster than the interest rate, too, so win-win: you also get free money.
Of course, OUR wealth, meaning the wealth most commonly held by the middle and upper middle class, single family homes, are taxable. We tax the unrealized gains on home equity all the time, it's called a property tax.
We have convinced the general population that the property tax is somehow not a wealth tax, and that it's actually good and they should be against wealth taxes. I mean, it's absolutely genius.
We can -- and often do -- monetize the debt, but printing money to pay the debt is a regressive tax that affects those with the least disproportionately, so I would imagine you aren't trying to push for that.
Super high earners don't earn W2 income. It's mostly long term cap gains or gains in tax advantaged accounts. A 90% tax would just encourage them to never sell their stock and to borrow against it instead.
What happens when the stock market is up one year and down the next?
What happens when you force them all to sell and there is not enough liquidity to support current prices so the act of selling hammers the value?
You are just saying "let's slowing take equity away from founders" so we can throw it away into wasteful gov. spending.
But seriously, inequality is a complex issue, just 'let's soak the rich' is a dumb take and won't solve anything.
But social safety nets, estate taxes, single-payer fed health insurance, etc.. might be interesting as well as other ways to approach this. For example, maybe corporate tax rate should be ZERO, but some percentage of profits (let's say 25%) should be paid as dividend to employees.
I believe the things I believe because I think they're the best things to believe (acknowledging my imperfect knowledge, potential for errors, etc). If I thought something else was better than what I believe, I would update my beliefs towards that. If you don't think your beliefs are better than the alternatives, you don't actually believe in them.
So yes, I think my goals are the best possible goals to want.