Better way is to tax consumption, but that has never been popular in US.
Yes we complain a lot and criticize the government and don’t fully trust our polarized politicians, but a real “low trust” society is a far cry from what we have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...
1. More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide...
2. US tax system is not voluntary, but extremely coercive - the IRS is legendary in its blood-houndness and the US is probably the only country in the world that taxes non-resident citizens.
3. Abortion-Rights Protest Targets Homes of Kavanaugh, Roberts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-08/abortion-...
I am not sure if the US could already be classified as a low-trust society (probably not yet), but a strong negative trend is definitely present.
I'm not sure if this is the parent's intent, but there's a whole lot of sincere "the US is a third world country" sort of argumentation going around, predicated entirely on observations that the US falls short of certain utopian ideals). "The US should continue to improve" doesn't depend on pretense that the US lags the median for a given category, and I strongly suspect that this sort of rhetoric gives way to the sort of fatalism that prevents societies from progressing ("we can't progress, we're stuck in this miserable system, etc").
Fundamentally, poor and middle-class people spend a higher percentage of their annual income on goods and services than rich people do. There just isn't enough stuff that one could ever want to buy (or services to partake in) for rich people to spend the same proportion annually.
The best you'd be able to manage is limiting your consumption taxes to things that only very wealthy people can afford in the first place, like superyachts. But at that point, a) you're not managing to bring in a huge amount of revenue with it, and b) you might as well just raise the higher income tax brackets, or add taxes on wealth over $X amount.
In any case, what the govt doesn't take in taxes, it can just take via inflation.
Wealth confiscation via inflation is great! it doesn't require politicians to justify higher taxes to their constituents (and thus face the wrath of their voters), and it can be implemented by unaccountable and unelected officials at the Fed.
I am the most anti-socialist person I know and even to me, inflation is too cruel of a tax.
