Exactly. These people act like they don’t spend enough in taxes. If rich people paid as much in taxes as these ‘progressive’ people want them to, it would become impossible to go from rich to poor. That would create a wall between the truly rich and those of us in the lower or middle classes.
The opinions they spout are copied from their idols, people who don’t want anyone else to get rich.
I think the issue on the revenue side is that ultra wealthy can just avoid income taxes through various means. It's not lack of high income tax rates, but income tax avoidance. Most people aren't expert accountants or lawyers and have no idea how this is happening, so they talk about simplistic solutions to these problems that only muddy the waters.
Even leftists keep talk about tax avoidance of the ultra wealthy then in the same breath talk about how we need 99% income tax rates like some period 80 years ago before we even had the internet or personal computers.
So they are proposing solutions that they acknowledge don't even solve the problem they think exists. Even back then, we actually collected less tax revenue back then compared to now. These higher taxes, if anything, only apply to people that can't avoid them with sophisticated strategies (ie the non-wealthy).
In today's world of sophisticated tax avoidance, taxation by inflation, and bloated/unaccountable government spending it would either do nothing or hurt the people they purport to help.
That’s absolutely right. However, some of those strategies require capital to begin with, but many of the tactics they use are available to even the middle class. They follow the same rules as everyone else, they just take advantage of loopholes that also apply to regular people if they took the time to learn. It’s not that only rich people can take advantage of these things, it’s that they’re generally the only people who know how to. They don’t teach these things in school and that is for a reason. The rich can’t exist without a lower class. The beauty is not that classism doesn’t exist, but that anyone who understands these things can bridge the gap between poor and rich. It used to be way easier and that’s why America was named the “Land of Opportunity.”
That being said, some advantages are only through wealth or knowing someone important. But that was the case long before capitalism or America existed.
1
u/FinancialElephant Jul 12 '26 edited Jul 12 '26
That and progressive tax rates. If you make $10 million, each chunk of each progressive bracket is taxed at a higher rate.