This is not at all clear. To many others, the fundamental end goal of taxation is to fund the government. The trillion dollar question is: is our goal to make the poor richer or the rich poorer? There’s broad disagreement on the answer to that question, and without acknowledging this, we’re really just shouting past each other.
Having a strong middle class is a deep factor for the stability of a country. Inequalities is easily linkable to social unrest.
Rolling back these tax rates has led to recession after recession and ever increasing gaps between the 1% and everyone else, and the middle class is shrinking.
It doesn't seem like it's such a hard line to draw between all of this.
Again, in the grand debate about whether we ought to make the poor richer or the rich poorer, both sides would agree that "having a strong middle class is a deep factor for the stability of the country". Although I appreciate that you may not believe this (and you're entitled to your opinion), many are of the opinion that it's actually entirely possible to have a strong middle class by establishing a floor without pulling down the ceiling. That's the contention.
> Inequalities is easily linkable to social unrest.
What we're less certain of, is if this is due to inequality, or if it's due to existence of poverty alongside prosperity. If everyone below the poverty line was magically lifted out of poverty while preserving the existence of billionaires, would that lead to social unrest? It's worth checking in with Sweden, which has more billionaires per capita than the US, no wealth tax, imposes broad-based taxes on the middle class, and not particularly known for having social unrest.
But isn't the purpose of a democratic government to keep society functional and peaceful?
Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US, no wealth tax, and levies broad-based taxes on the middle class. The top marginal tax rate kicks in at 1.5 times the average wage, whereas in the US the top marginal tax rate kicks in at 9.2 times the average wage. And yet, you might probably define Swedish society as "functional and peaceful".
This is a popular talking point, but one that has thus far been soundly refuted by empirical results.
https://twitter.com/AlecStapp/status/1401596911522615299
No amount of money will install a political leader that cannot win votes.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-c...
Second of all, the influence of lobbyists on how laws are formed is "well known" as a talking point, and nothing else. There aren't any hard empirical studies that draw a causal line.
In fact, to really drive home that point, I'll reiterate a sentence I wrote in a previous reply to you, but with a minor addition:
Sweden has more billionaires per capita than the US, no wealth tax, and levies broad-based taxes on the middle class. The top marginal tax rate kicks in at 1.5 times the average wage, whereas in the US the top marginal tax rate kicks in at 9.2 times the average wage. Lobbying on policymakers is unregulated (http://www.aalep.eu/lobbying-landscape-sweden). And yet, you might probably define Swedish society as "functional and peaceful".
What if I reject your premise that those are opposite, and that I can heavily tax the rich which at the same time making the poor richer?
The vast majority of European countries, especially those with generous welfare states, fund their programs via broad-based taxes that fall on the middle class (https://taxfoundation.org/scandinavian-countries-taxes-2021/). They also happen to have more billionaires per capita than the US.
I didn't set up the false dilemma. If you want to discuss them as two different propositions (as you seem to), that's fine.
Your link discusses the Scandinavian countries. Those have a GINI (income score) about half that of the US. Of course they have broad-based taxes. That seems to be a requirement. It's just not an argument that they are prioritizing minimizing the degree to which the rich are made poorer.
> Your link discusses the Scandinavian countries. Those have a GINI (income score) about half that of the US. Of course they have broad-based taxes.
I want to address everything you just said, but these two points stand out.
The GINI coefficient is not a particularly useful metric precisely because the US could halve its GINI simply by increasing the income of its poorest people. It tells us nothing about the degree to which a country goes to make its rich poorer.
Which brings me to your second point; Scandinavian countries have the GINI scores that they do precisely because they have welfare that can only be feasibly funded by broad-based taxes (even Bernie Sanders admits this https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/06/28/sanders-middl...). And the only way you get a society to adopt broad based taxes is if you decide the variable you want to optimize is making the poor richer, rather than the rich poorer.
In America, especially among the center-left, there's a strong aversion to adopting taxes on the middle class — it's the only way one can fund the kinds of programs that reduce GINI — precisely because the rhetoric is less around making sure the poor are taken care of, but rather around making sure "the rich pay their fair share".
So that's the reason why it's presented as mutually exclusive goals. Once society agrees upon an OKR, it will converge around any solution that satisfies that OKR. As long as our OKRs are defined around how rich the rich are, rather than how poor the poor are, the solutions we converge around will look less like the GINI-reducing Scandinavian countries (which have high middle class taxes and VATs), and more like the US, which happens to have the most progressive taxation in the developed world[1][2].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/04/05/ameri...
[2] https://faculty.washington.edu/vmenaldo/Inequality%20Researc...
I'm confused by why you think you're disagreeing with me. My point is that efforts to make poor people richer can be totally separate from efforts to make rich people poorer. Of course broad-base taxation can raise poor people's standard of living. That's my point, it's totally orthogonal to whether we want to have additional taxes on the very rich to prevent wealth inequality.
I completely appreciate that you may think it's a worthwhile cause (or not, who am I to ascribe your views), but I'm just pointing out that it's worth separating "making the poor richer" from "making the rich poorer"; as you rightly pointed out, they are different goals. Some people even want both!
Among those that adopt zero-sum thinking, there has unfortunately been a conflation of the two aims by suggesting that the only way to make the poor richer is to make the rich poorer. What I am pointing out is that not everyone adopts this zero-sum thinking, and the best way to identify whether one does is by asking the question: "is the goal to make the poor richer, or the rich poorer?".
Based on your argumentation, I concede that a more complete question is "is the goal to make the poor richer, the rich poorer, or both?". Many folks are in column A, many in B, and many in C. Until we acknowledge that, we're just shouting talking points past each other based on assumed moral premises.