With high marginal rates, the tax shelters the Hollywood rich invested in were less productive investments. Yes high marginal rates will lead to more CPA hours to get around the high taxes, but that is just an example of the Broken Window fallacy. When there is no way around them, very high rates will lead to dead weight losses to the economy as economic activity won't be done.
Because allowing for one idea would lead into another.
70% tax is a start. Not the end. The idea is to find where the "excess" income is taking place and add additional taxes in that area to direct the income into investment and services.
70% may be a start at ordinary income. But does it apply to investments? And then what's next?
I think the key question for Dell and others is: can you show proof that the current approach of lower taxes boost the average individual income of workers? Because right now we're seeing great numbers from Wall Street, but wages are still virtually flat year over year. How does the Dow continue to climb but workers' pay stay the same?
this whole green new deal proposal is "lets go spend billions more dollars on XYZ" a lot of the mental pushback is what are you going to stop spending on today to pay for it? the answer: "nothing, we're just going to raise taxes"
i believe opposition to this is less about can the 1% afford the taxes or not, and more for principled spending
Why does the funding of current projects affect you level of support for different projects? That's sunk cost fallacy.
Like with much data, it has to put in context with other data, but I am pretty sure most people don't know that fact.
As how that tax burden is allocated, do you think the rich paid more of a share of the taxes back when there were high rates?
In 1980 the highest federal marginal rate was 70%. The top 10% paid 49% of federal income taxes in 1980 and the bottom 50% paid 7% of federal income taxes. In 2015, the top 10% paid paid 70% of federal incomes taxes and the bottom 50% paid 3% of federal income taxes. (http://www.ntu.org/foundation/page/who-pays-income-taxes)
The tax code is very large, so you can implement a 70% marginal rate on earned income and capital gains, but that will just shift accounting elsewhere.
Alternatively, we could get better at our costs. Actually look to balance the budget by decreasing military spending, rein in pharma companies and healthcare costs, and then if needed raise taxes to make up the difference.
It would have a much better effect, because increasing the taxes on the wealthy would do nothing to adjust healthcare spending, high cost of drugs, a lack of investment in our infrastructure.
Hauser's law is the proposition that, in the United States, federal tax revenues since World War II have always been approximately equal to 19.5% of GDP, regardless of wide fluctuations in the marginal tax rate.[1] Historically, since the end of World War II, federal tax receipts as a percentage of gross domestic product averaged 17.9%, with a range from 14.4% to 20.9% between 1946 - 2007.[2]
So...yeah, marginal rates have been 70% or higher...but the Federal government has never successfully collected that much, due to write-offs, tax shelters, and other schemes that were largely closed in 1986 with...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Reform_Act_of_1986