Hunchman801 wrote: Fri Nov 12, 2021 1:40 pm
The thing is, income tax brackets are pretty much irrelevant to the "top 1%". The richest people in the world do not pay themselves salaries, or barely. They do not live off their work, they live off their capital. And some don't even pay themselves dividends either, they just live off huge credit lines collateralized with their stocks and other types of securities.
Focusing the debate on income tax means taxing work, and therefore production, even more, while the true problems lie elsewhere. I'm not sure how the inheritance system works in Canada, but I'm pretty sure that with decent optimization, someone can inherit most of their parent's fortune, live off it and barely do anything with their lives, while someone born into a poor or middle-class family that worked their ass off to get a high-paying job will be milked like a cow by the government.
That's why I think we should stop overtaxing work and instead focus on the transmission of capital if we want to tackle inequality. Then people, with equal opportunities at birth, could do as they please with the money they've rightfully earned, and unless they start living forever, money will always end up in the hands of the state and be redistributed.
Of course, it'll be hard to get such a system to work if it's not implemented globally, but that's definitely the direction we should head towards.
Those are excellent points. I was talking with my brother (who's a financial analyst) about it recently and he mentioned similar things, especially regarding storing money in off-shore accounts. Figuring out how to keep money in the country would help, but that seems insanely difficult to control, and whatever money they are taxed with progressive brackets might push them even further in the wrong direction.
I don't feel educated enough to answer most of these questions, since they're mostly phrased as "is X effective", which would involve intensely studying the economy of various countries and coming to a mathematical conclusion. Regardless, here are my "results" (rather similar to yours):
and I’ll see if I can find it now tho
