_Earned_ income should correspond to productivity.
But unearned income enjoys a dramatically lower tax rate (the capital gains rate is lower than income rate, and capital gains are not subject to FICA/self-employment taxes)
But unearned income enjoys a dramatically lower tax rate (the capital gains rate is lower than income rate, and capital gains are not subject to FICA/self-employment taxes)
That said, if no income were taxed at all, any disparity between how the various kinds of income were taxed would go away.
My proposal (in the GP of the post you responded to) was to tax consumption, i.e., a national sales tax or something like it.
> Capital seems to me a viable choice.
What would count as "capital"?
Whatever the answer is, this would seem to me to have the same issue as income taxes have: you would be taxing production instead of consumption, hence lowering the incentive to produce.
It's not an ideological framing. The IRS calls it that.