They are in the top tax bracket.
The federal income tax is based on income, not wealth.
The federal income tax is based on income, not wealth.
They are not in the top bracket by choice - a luxury option unavailable to non-wealthy people in the working middle-class who actually are in the top tax bracket.
As you helpfully noted in your second half of your comment, high wealth, deliberately low income[0] means they are not in the top tax bracket[1] on the basis of their carefully calculated, tax-optimized income.
0. Taxable events need be overhauled to cover loopholes, including removing tax-advantages of borrowing against securities. The legal fiction that allows rich people to spend money not recognized as income is deleterious.
1. Warren Buffet, IIRC, noted his assistant was in a higher tax bracket than him.
There is no optimization for anything actually, its just income. There's lots of different forms of taxes that the US government takes part in as you know. Quitting your day job removes the income part until distribution/settlement for any owned assets.
You can argue for a wealth tax, but conflating two separate concepts is not how you do it.
My footnotes are the entirety of my argument, and it's not even as radical as a wealth tax. My argument has 2 easy steps:
1. Remove the arbitrage between actual liquidity events and the limited set of what the IRS currently considers taxable events. Borrowing against securities not being taxable is an example of what's broken. Arbitrage using trusts or LLCs needs to be deleted, based on controlling interests and/or ultimate beneficiary.
2. Align tax rates on capital gains vs. income
Is is also broken that you don't pay taxes on the mortgage you borrowed to buy a house?
Or the money you borrowed to buy a car?
What about the money you borrowed when using your credit card?
Or the money you borrowed to fund your college years?
For the vast majority of folk who take out the loans you listed, the loans are leveraged and are either unsecured, or secured by the car or property the loan was made out for, and therefore no underlying value to tax prior to the loan being issued. You knew this already, and I have doubts you're making this false equivalency argument in good faith.
Mortgage loans are secured by the house.
Car loans are secured by the car.
They are equivalent. There's nothing special about margin debt.