[sooheon]

Tax the rentier bracket's rent income. The overlap need not be considered.

> The reality is that that professional/managerial bracket has a large proportion of both the wealth and income in America

This is irrelevant. Tax policy should not be judged by what proportion of total wealth or income it collects, but by the economic incentives it creates and the externalities it offsets.

[MiroF]

Actions should be judged by their consequences. Size of the resource collected impacts the impact of the consequence.

[sooheon]

> Actions should be judged by their consequences

I agree, we just have different perspectives on which consequences are relevant, and on which timescales.

Optimizing for "size of resource collected" at time 0 affects the system and each agent's incentives within that system, usually leading to the kind of adversarial loophole-chasing/closing we see with income tax and tax havens.

Optimizing for economically sound incentives will lead to higher "impact" (by my definition, reduction of externalities, inefficiency, and inequality) in the long run for a dynamic system, imho.