Warp wrote:
> People tend to vote with their feet, so to speak.

It's interesting to note that when the idea of income tax first started in 
the USA, it was at the time that large manufacturing started. I.e., at the 
time when "wealth" meant "large immobile factories".

We didn't have income tax when riding a horse for three days took you to a 
different tax jurisdiction and you could carry everything you needed to set 
up a business in a wagon.

>   Taxing rich people a lot is not very productive because they are so few.

That's not quite true, methinks. In the USA, something like 40% of the 
income tax is paid by the top 1% of the taxpayers, with the top 0.1% of the 
tax payers pay 20% of the income tax. (The top 1% also earned some 23% of 
all the money, mind.)

At this point, it's hard to understand how you can earn $7 million a year 
actually doing something personally productive. At that point, I think you'd 
have to be playing with money. I suppose you could be a sports star or a 
Bill Gates, but I don't think that handful accounts for 1% of the people 
filing tax returns.

> Leveling out the tax percentage a bit raises low and medium wealth people's
> taxes only a bit, 

I think in the USA at least, this wouldn't be quite true. Plus, we already 
reward people for that, because businesses pay taxes differently, which is 
where the whole rich-people-don't-pay-taxes comes from. Rich people get out 
of paying taxes by not making any income. They simply have businesses that 
*do* make income buy them a bunch of stuff.

>   I really think that "rich people getting even richer" has been negatively
> hyped way too much. Personally I don't care how rich they get, if that helps
> everybody by keeping the country's economy running.

I think there comes a point at which the rich people being *too* rich is 
negative. They can unduly influence government, and they can have far more 
than they could ever spend while needy people are starving.

Certainly Bill Gates being rich makes lots of jobs, and Tiger Woods makes 
lots of jobs and thus gets rich. But when you start looking at (say) some of 
the feudal societies, perhaps, where the Kings built castles they never saw 
just because they could, while others were starving and freezing, yeah, it 
can go too far.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "We'd like you to back-port all the changes in 2.0
    back to version 1.0."
   "We've done that already. We call it 2.0."

Post a reply to this message