I’m looking for serious answers to understand the mentality. Please avoid the snark. I know it’s low hanging and tempting but I’m pretty sure most, if not all, of use here on Lemmy “get it”.

I just can’t get out of my head how absurd it is that we, in the U.S. anyway, put so much of the tax burden on working class folks instead of those most benefiting from our economic system.

It seems to me the standard deduction should be at least the median personal income (~$40k) if not the mean(~$60k) with progressive tax brackets adjusted to cover costs thereafter and possibly a supplemental wealth tax.

But I’m not an economist so trying to understand why I’m wildly wrong and this would be a terrible idea either from an economic perspective or from a political perspective.

  • Kit
    3·
    2 hours ago

    Something I never see mentioned is the risk of “brain drain”. If you tax the rich too heavily, there’s a possibility that they’ll just move to another country with lower taxes, taking their companies (and jobs) with them.

    • Waryle@jlai.lu
      1·
      5 minutes ago

      That’s not brain drain. Brain drain is when high qualified people leave their country, mostly because of the lack of infrastructures costing them opportunities for studying or working in their respective field.

      What you’re talking about is capital flight. This is an issue that is systematically raised as a counter-argument by liberals in debates on taxation. The problem is that it is seriously overestimated:

      • Leaving a country is a lot more complicated than it sounds: you lose your family, your friends, your culture, your habits. Many millionaires who leave their country end up coming back after a few years.
      • You can’t relocate your real estate investments.
      • Going abroad doesn’t exempt you from paying taxes (especially exit taxes).
      • A country that wishes to do so can prohibit the relocation of a profitable company, or even nationalize it.
      • Many rich people who threaten to leave if taxes are raised end up doing the math: if there’s a profitable business, they’ll stay. And in a country that finances its infrastructure soundly and has a good distribution of wealth, there’s profitable business to be had.