> SALT exemptions should definitely not be restored - I grew up in the north east where those SALT exemptions are fully utilized but they introduce an illogical perverse motivation for state and local governments to spend freely since any taxes they introduce are essentially just that level of government getting a free non-revokable payment from the federal government.

You've confused the effect of a deduction with that of a 100% credit.

What SALT deductions do is they avoid creating perverse disincentives for state/local taxpayer-funded programs that create economic benefit for both the state/local taxpayers and the federal treasury.

> they introduce an illogical perverse motivation for state and local governments to spend freely since any taxes they introduce are essentially just that level of government getting a free non-revokable payment from the federal government.

This is just not true. The SALT exemption lets you deduct the SALT taxes from your income, not your tax bill, so this is not just a transfer from the federal government.

I.e. If you had a flat federal rate of 10%, a flat state rate of 10% and an income of 100k, the SALT deduction would reduce your taxes from 20k to 19k. There is some subsidy here since the state gets 10k, whereas you are only paying 9k for those services, but its clearly not free money.

> what is one number compared to another number without context

Economists have studied the topic of most efficient tax rates, in terms of bringing in government revenue, and 82.7% is above the point where you maximize revenue, i.e. you would raise more money with a lower rate.

> Economists have studied the topic of most efficient tax rates, in terms of bringing in government revenue, and 82.7% is above the point where you maximize revenue, i.e. you would raise more money with a lower rate.

I don't think "raise the most money" is the goal we're shooting for though. I mean, it's important, but it's not the only goal.

When you start talking about rates in the 90% range what you're really asking for is for rich people to hire a tax attorney or account to lie to you about how much money the rich person makes. It's the definition of dead weight loss.

Rich people find tax loopholes to exploit. Outright lying can get them thrown in jail.

What is the goal that justifies raising tax rates so high that it starts lowering revenue raised?

That's basically cutting off your nose to spite your face IMO.

Raising taxes on the rich means you can fund the government without raising (and ideally by lowering) taxes on everybody else. This is objectively a social good (the rich can bear the burden of incredibly high tax rates, whereas current tax rates are a very high burden on a large percentage of the population). I am not an economist but I would also assume it would benefit the economy by stimulating spending. I believe this is in fact the basic idea of the tax cuts so favored by Republicans, except it turns out that giving rich people more money doesn't do this (because they already have enough money to cover all the spending they want to do), whereas giving everyone else more money does.

The goal of taxes has never been "raise as much money for the government as possible", it's "raise enough money for the government to fund government operations, hopefully without hurting the economy in the process".

I think we're arguing the same thing, but my point was that at some marginal rate (around 70% give or take 10%), increasing the tax rate causes you to get less money from rich people, which all but the most radical fringes of the left can generally agree is not a desired outcome. And 83% is definitely past that point. So unless your explicit goal is to just stop people having that much money, that combined tax rate is too high.

By what mechanism would increasing the tax rate result in getting less money from rich people? I can only imagine the answer is because they reduce their income, though I don't know what your explanation is for rich people reducing their income when the tax rate hits 70% ± 10%. What's more, if rich people are reducing their income, it seems to me that this means they're not taking advantage of as many opportunities to earn money as otherwise, which hopefully means not-so-rich people are now taking advantage of those opportunities (or, more cynically, are not being taken advantage of as much by rich people).

So yes, if taxing rich people more means getting less money from them, and if the reasoning for this leads to not-so-rich people earning more money, then that seems like a win.