[parineum]

> Sales taxes are regressive too for example and bring much much more revenue.

That's because "tax the rich" is actually pretty bad tax policy because the rich really don't make a lot more income than the upper-middle to lower classes.

If you look at countries with robust social safety nets, they don't get there by taxing the rich.

[watwut]

They dont get there by making rich untaxed, uncontrolably powerful and above the law either. Taxing the rich is a necessary component, just like the justice system that applies to rich too.

[Epa095]

They do on the other hand hold a significant portion of the wealth. Unfortunately wealth tax is complicated, both because actually measuring the wealth for tax purposes can be hard, and the rich can (and will) just move away from any sufficiently effecient tax scheme.

So upper middle class ends up paying the bill.

[Workaccount2]

The really bad part is that the middle/upper-middle class is the real cash cow, the top ~75%. These people are incredibly numerous and have good to incredibly good disposable income.

But since they are such a large cohort, you cannot form a policy around increasing the burden on them. And after all, the tech family pulling $450k/yr are still a "working grunts".

So it's all eye's on the top 1%, but a true wealth gap fix would actually come mostly from harvesting the wealth of the top 20-30%.

[thaumasiotes]

> the rich can (and will) just move away from any sufficiently effecient tax scheme

England managed to confiscate the estates of its major lords through the inheritance tax.

The rich can leave, but they can't take their house with them.

[kiba]

It's easy to tax certain assets, such as land. LVT is actually the ideal tax in many ways, since a LVT is undodgable. Actually it doesn't matter whose name is on the title.

Sufficiently high LVT will deter speculation, leading to collapse in land price and encouraging efficient usage of land and drastically affecting our political landscape.

[wqaatwt]

That’s not the only reason. Well to an extent it is, because the rich are much better at optimizing taxes, however you can close the “loopholes” and such, then there are wealth taxes.

The problem is that the rich are ultra mobile, just like their capital, so unless you restrict that they’ll just move somewhere else where taxes are low.

So countries basically end up competing with each other by lowering taxes to attract them while destroying their middle classes..

Same more or less applies to companies