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Once a person has wealth over, say, $500 million, then there should be a 100% tax.
However it might be interesting to explore an option that required people who own a stake in a company that has grown beyond a certain size to be required to siphon off some of those shares to employees over time in a way where it was not conducted on the open market and would not affect share price.
I also question whether corporate entities should be allowed to own shares and what the benefits are of that. Should private investment firms be allowed to accumulate massive stakes in public companies?
Local governments are starved for money, and almost all of their funding comes from local property taxes, that is, normal people. So, these mega-rich are allowed to get unboundedly wealthy, while normal people have to pay to keep society running as a minimal level. The mega-rich's money, as well as corporations', needs to flow back through the system. It does no good to let it concentrate so heavily and ultimately do nothing while it sits there.
But I disagree in that I think we absolutely should avoid it because a larger federal government has been heavily correlated with less local funding (so much so that the SALT deduction was once a thing). It's given rise to globalization and large multi-national conglomerates. It creates a situation where power & money is too concentrated.
I agree with that, but they could just, you know, lower taxes on the lower and middle class to balance it out.
I’m a US tax payer since less than a decade. My experience is that I pay a significant portion of my incomes to taxes that only marginally benefit me or folks around me.
Recent uptick of direct distribution is nice.
But a leadership in the stewarding of the land would be tasteful and send the right message IMO.
It’s fascinating to see the Western European countries I’m familiar with being blinded by the economic might of the US but not realizing how little the average citizen benefit from it.
With that said, the parent commenter subscribes to what political philsophies and/or ethics? ...
If you tax them 100% they'll just stop working or bail to another country, and then you collect zero tax revenue from them. At 70% most of them will just suck it up and pay.
(I realize France is a counterpoint here, but I'd argue it was a half-assed attempt, and they have neighboring French-speaking tax havens that have no real U.S. equivalent.)
The reality is that nobody knows for sure what the curve of revenue vs. tax rate looks like other than at those two end points, which makes the entire concept completely useless.
Your inability to conceive of a useful purpose for such a quantity of money does not justify prohibiting its existence.
>I do not understand how the U.S. government does not view these billionaires as serious ideological threats to democracy, the court system, national security, etc
Cooperation. A government that can't handle the idea of powerful citizens has all the tools it needs to make almost all those people (hard to banish all the Christian missionaries, and martyring them is the surest way to grow more) leave or fall in line, but I don't think many people look at Venezuela or North Korea as ideal places to govern in terms of democracy, the court system, national security, etc.
What inability and where was it demonstrated? Are you referring to a useful purpose if it was taxed or a useful purpose for individuals to have such wealth? If the latter, then I propose that an individual containing such wealth is less useful than it being returned.
Those things and countries you mentioned have nothing to do with this discussion.
