[montbonnot]

If you make $900k/y and you're fine losing $378000 then we need a flexible system. Where people like you you'd be working %42 of their time for free, while people like me would chose to earn each and every minute back. Time is more valuable than money. I'd be fine losing %42 of my annual salary working %42 less.

[joshuanomed]

Time is absolutely more valuable than money, which is why I focus on making as much as possible for a few hours a month.

If you want to accumulate wealth, focus less on how much money you pay in taxes, and more on how to make the money you earn work more for you. If you earn $1MM in app sales in one year, fantastic, great for you. Pay your taxes, and invest the remainder to build up a business that earns you $500k a year with minimal effort on your part.

Of that $900k AGI, only about $450k was wages, the rest is earnings from investments (which get taxed differently depending on how they're paid).

[joshuanomed]

So, you don't need any public services at all?

I'm not losing money, I'm contracting out a variety of services I'd otherwise have to pay for.

[montbonnot]

I do. But a police officer gets taxed. A fireman gets taxed too (a lot in my opinion). What are they subscribed to? Themselves? How about using big corporate money to pay for that? Look at Apple they run most of their offices outside of the US to avoid being ripped-off by the US government. If they get a fair tax bracket then they'd bring their business back in the US. Then we could use that money instead of our own money.

[joshuanomed]

Apple keeps a lot of its cash “overseas” because of 30+ years of tax policy changes to shift the tax burden from businesses to individuals.

As long as business can leverage “overseas” cash assets to issue debt in the US without paying taxes on the cash, they'll do so, only until the interest rate on the debt exceeds how much they'd have to pay in taxes to repatriate the cash.