[gok]

Extremely progressive taxation isn't effective. The very rich have ways of hiding or deferring income.

There's also the problem that there simply isn't very much money at that level. Just to put it into perspective, the top 1% of tax payers only had an AGI of about $2 trillion. Let me get even more extreme than what you propose. If you taxed at 100% over $1M/year, you'd only get $431 billion. So that would only add about $200 billion (about 15%) of Federal revenue per year since they're already paying about half of that on earnings over $1M/yr. Oh yeah, BTW, how would they pay local and state taxes out of that?

[amelius]

The problem is the rich using their wealth for more wealth accumulation, e.g. through rent seeking. Even if progressive taxing doesn't get you much money directly, indirectly it will improve wealth through a better wealth distribution.

In other words, it is no problem that the rich have more money; the problem is them using that money against the rest of us. If you don't see how, try entering a game of Monopoly a few rounds after it has started.

[xenadu02]

Then close the loopholes.

The long-term alternative is revolution where the rich are lined up against a wall and shot.

There is no natural law guaranteeing a right to private property. Nor is there anything guaranteeing wealth shall accrue to the wealthy. We could just as easily make it the law that accumulating net assets > $10m is punishable by death.

This same pattern has repeated itself many times. The people at the top accumulate all the money, the economy grinds to a halt, the 0.1% use propaganda and control of state power to suppress any attempts to change the status quo (whether violent or not), then eventually the system collapses under its own weight. The outcome is often quite bad for everyone but since the 90% have nothing to lose that hardly matters.

Unfortunately it was fear of communist revolution kept capitalism in check. Now nothing does. I fear we're going to continue our slow slide downward, with ever more cuts, voter suppression, and various fascist policies in an effort to control "the people" and prevent change. Without a relief valve pressure will just continue to build until it can't.

[dragonwriter]

> Extremely progressive taxation isn't effective.

It pretty clearly is, which is why each downward shift of the nominal tax burden in the US (stretching back to the income to payroll tax burden shift under Reagan) has had noticeable effects on accelerating inequality.

> The very rich have ways of hiding or deferring income.

Mostly, as a direct result of tax policy directly designed to frustrate tax progressivity, most notably giving preferentially low tax rates to kinds of income mostly earned by the rich (long term capital gains are a big example), and loading up extra taxes (on top of normal income taxes) on labor income.

Making taxes more progressive is less about increasing progressivity in nominal rates as it is about addressing those issues (though making the nominal rates more progressive may also be part of it.)

[softawre]

The problem isn't the tax rate, it's the growing wealth inequality. Since you seem to have thought much about this already - do you agree it's a problem, and how would you fix it, if not for progressive taxation?

[gok]

Growing wealth/income inequality is bad. Transfers can be effective for reducing wealth inequality. We'd need more revenue for that, however.

Progressive taxation is good. Progressive taxation that only targets the top 0.1% isn't effective unless income inequality were much worse than it is.

To make a meaningful amount of more revenue via income tax without hurting the bottom 90% too much, we'd need to target the top 10%. That probably means the top tax bracket should kick in around $130K. Much lower than where it is now, but high by the standards of many other rich countries (in the Netherlands 52% kicks in at $63k/yr, in Denmark it's 60% at $55/yr).

We should add a VAT too. Possibly with a simple UBI-style system to offset its impact on the poor (since they consume more of their earnings than the rich)

[itchyouch]

It's not the additional tax revenue that becomes the benefit. If anything above X amount gets eaten by tax, then it makes sense to increases business spending by:

- reinvesting into the business (cascades to more economic activity)

- paying for more employee benefits

- increasing employee compensation

- the cascading economic activity provides even more people with opportunities to make more money. virtuous effects.

[gok]

It sounds like you're talking about things that would be affected by a corporate tax rate, not a personal tax rate, which GP was talking about?

[itchyouch]

Many small businesses use flow through taxation, so they don’t pay both corporate and personal tax. S corps and LLCs.

Even if the personal tax was capped at 5M, it then doesnt make sense for personal distributions greater than 5m, so the money stays in the corporation for reinvestment.