1. Companies only have money because of the work I and others do.

2. It doesn't follow that when companies have more money their workers get more. Evidence is: record profits concomitant with layoffs, corporate profits vs wages, etc etc.

3. Taxes fund a government that answers to me. Capital powers corporations that not only don't answer to me but likely want to exploit me.

The situation is trickle down from laissez-faire is definitely proven wrong just by the situation we are in and is the starting point of the discussion. Tax is just a tool to correct the failure of the system of failing to correctly redistribute productivity gains from workers starting a few decades ago (and the point above is with the promises of LLM it’s crucial we address that situation). Robbery or not is not the debate here, income tax higher than capital tax is just a good candidate cause and solution (given historical data), but of course we can discuss alternatives.

>With either tax, the economic system that consists of you and your employer is being robbed

Except differences in tax rates will have significant impact on what type of income people want to earn. If personal income is taxed lower than capital, then people will want to increase their income through work.

If personal income is taxed higher than capital, people are incentivized to build more machines than the economy needs and this will put people out of work.

IMHO that is very misleading in this context where there are a lot of Americans.

If the VAT rates went to 0% you would still get to keep the exact same amount as with the current 25% rate. And when discussing B2B prices VAT is never included, as it is generally not an expense for the company but rather just an accounting detail.

Sure that’s risky for 100% of population. But for 0.1 percent of population who makes many millions a year, who cares? No one is that special of a snowflake we need to optimize for their productivity. Most of those people are either already workaholics or already retired on a yatch.

There’s an economic incentive for someone to increase their productivity at every taxation level that is less than 100%, no?

That’s not true. Many companies people work at provide them little to no incentive to work harder or better, yet still a lot of people try to do so. Lots of places have almost no possibility of promotion just the ability to go elsewhere. Some professions like teaching, nursing pharmacy treat all workers as interchangeable with no performance incentives.

Sure this works for creative endeavors. Now what would motivate someone to pick fruit in the summer Sun? Or clean toilets in a corporate office?

Sure you could say, "there are some people who just enjoy picking fruit." But are there enough people to satisfy the demand? And even if there are, what do you do with them as that demand decreases? The people who love picking fruit will have to clean toilets.

North Korea called, it wants it's ideology back.

Wth. Are you trolling or what?