It's Time to Tax Us More

Given that this isn't signed by every rich person ever. Wouldn't that just mean that the people left at the top are the assholes? If 10% if the richest 1% (not necessarily the richest 10% of them) stopped using tax havens, they get punished, while the other rich people her to reap the rewards.

If everyone takes a 20% haircut, everyone retains roughly the same relative competitiveness.

If you individually / manually drop 20%, you're disadvantaging yourself.

Basically, spending money is losing. No-one wants to spend money. That's why we have taxes, to force redistribution.

Isn't that another way of saying there's extreme economic inequality?

I mean, if 10 people controlled 99% of the wealth in the US, and the rest were below the poverty line and didn't need to pay income taxes, then those 10 people would pay 100% of all income taxes.

(I say "income taxes" because even the poorest pay sales taxes and other taxes; sales taxes are at the state level or lower.)

But, even though those 10 would pay 99% of the taxes, that doesn't mean its unfair.

So, just giving the numbers you gave doesn't really say much about the situation, does it?

You write "if the government were to outright confiscate the wealth of the 1 percenters, that would fund the government for just a few weeks".

That's .. not right, is it? I mean, the 10 richest Americans, as listed at https://www.worldstrendingtopmost.com/2017-2018-2019-2020/ce..., have a net wealth of $562.9 billion.

"The U.S. government's total revenue is estimated to be $3.643 trillion for Fiscal Year 2020." says https://www.thebalance.com/current-u-s-federal-government-ta... .

So, those 10 alone would pay for 2 months of the federal government.

Table 3 of https://www.nber.org/papers/w24085.pdf says there are about 635,000 households worth at least $10 million. If I do the math right, that's enough to fund the government for 2 years.

The excessive taxes of the 40s and 50s were directly responsible for the linking of health care to employers (which is the direct cause of the current healthcare mess we're in):

"The idea that employers should provide health care benefits has a long, if checkered, history. Railroads and other rough-and-tumble firms experimented with 'industrial clinics' in the late 19th century, and Montgomery Ward, the mail-order giant, rolled out the first group health insurance early in the next one. But there was almost no indication for decades that employer-sponsored health insurance would spread from sea to shining sea.

World War II disrupted those trends. As demand for everything — particularly labor — climbed, Congress passed the Stabilization Act of 1942, which allowed the president to freeze wages and salaries for all the nation's workers. A day after its passage, President Franklin Roosevelt issued an executive order invoking these powers, which applied to 'all forms of direct or indirect remuneration to an employee,' including but not limited to salaries and wages, as well as 'bonuses, additional compensation, gifts, commissions, fees.'

But there was an exemption of massive proportions slipped into a fateful clause: 'insurance and pension benefits' could grow 'in a reasonable amount' during the freeze.

As companies struggled to deal with wartime labor shortages, the wage freeze left them in a serious bind: How could they retain workers if they couldn't give raises? If they didn't soon realize the allure of fringe benefits, insurance companies pressed that case through marketing campaigns, as historian Jennifer Klein has observed.

The Revenue Act of 1942 triggered another rush to enroll employees in health plans. By slapping corporations with tax rates of 80 or even up to 90 percent on any profits in excess of prewar revenue, Congress all but guaranteed a frenzied search for loopholes. Employee benefits, according to the new law, could be deducted from profits. As an anonymous employer observed in a study published on trends in health insurance, 'it was a case of paying the money for insurance for their employees or to Uncle Sam in taxes.'

In 1943, two rulings helped accelerate the movement toward employer-sponsored health insurance. The first was a directive by the Internal Revenue Service that employees did not have to pay taxes on premiums paid by their employers. The second was a decision by the National War Labor Board reaffirming the exemption of fringe benefits from the wage freeze.

After the war, a series of administrative and legal rulings kept these incentives in place, despite several attempts to reverse them. Meanwhile, the number of people enrolled in health insurance plans skyrocketed, with most of the growth driven by corporate group policies. In 1940, only 9.8 percent of Americans had some kind of medical insurance; by 1946, the number had grown to just under 30 percent."

That quote is from this article (note that I can't vouch for the rest of this article, the only part I read and know to be true is the part I quoted): https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-obamaca...

Fun fact: effective tax rates on the top were similar to now due to more loopholes then, which is why cutting that top rate didn’t result in massive revenue loss when it changed.