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by saddd 1154 days ago
Granular progressive taxation is the best answer to your question.

Trying to define buckets with arbitrary thresholds is futile.

It greatly benefits the top outliers, since the top bucket will have a huge disparity between its strictly defined lower bounds, and an infinite upper bound.

There's no need to "define rich". A formula without defined bounds (this is the most important part) should determine how much tax you pay, and it shouldn't discriminate between different forms of income. More importantly, all net worth gains should be taxed equally.

3 comments

Pretty sure they're getting at what the wealth is stored in, not monetary bounds. Those are the details that often get ignored when the "tax the rich" soundbite is used.
> More importantly, all net worth gains should be taxed equally.

What policy would you use for measuring someone's net worth? How would you ensure they're being honest?

Those are implementation details. It's difficult to accomplish these things in any taxation system, including our current one.
Well, these are really difficult implementation details to agree upon. There's no chance anyone will agree to something like this without seeing those details.
People typically don't agree to anything that impacts them negatively unless forced to.
I’m guessing you want unrealized gains to be taxed before they’re realized, since you said “all net worth gains” rather than “all income”?