PaKii94 wrote:I understand all of that. However to me this kind of stuff is putting a bandaid on a broken bone. Yes it provides some structural support/improvement from doing nothing but it doesn't address the core problem (the increasing wealth inequality) and it causes some complacency. "We already addressed the broken bone with a bandaid do we really need to do more?"
I completely agree that the wealth inequality is getting out of hand but that's not going to be solved by a graduated tax. The time is better used addressing the loopholes people with capital take advantage of to gain that wealth.
Also as other people have said, the rich can much more easily get up and leave, leaving the working class to deal with a negative feedback loop
Fundamentally I want lower taxes for all, better tax revenue management, and hopefully ( probably too idealistic) the wealthy investing their money back into society to help humanity advance for the better. Unfortunately the natural state of the world is greed and hoarding as much as possible which causes forced redistribution of wealth but at that point again the game becomes loopholes and dodges that only the wealthy have access to
Graduated tax is the only tool in our toolbox right now to solve wealth inequality. The problem is when people get uberwealthy, the capital gains tax law supercedes all graduated tax laws and we know from things like the panama papers that the really, really wealth are basically lying and cheating on their taxes and not remotely paying what they should.
If you removed the capital gains exception and were able to keep the existing graduated rates and actually collect them legitimately and stop all off-shoring of money and close all the other loop holes so that the rich actually had to pay their graduated tax rates, then I think that might actually be enough to solve the problem, if not, it'd sure make it a lot closer than currently.
Of course no one in Washington is even looking at removing the capital gains rate, and we don't remotely collect all the taxes we should from the uber wealthy (say top .1% or maybe even .01%, we probably get more than our fair share for the top 1% excluding those super wealthy individuals).