The CDC and NIH undoubtedly do great work, but they are one model and thus a single point of failure.
I'd much rather see dozens of more or less eccentric billionaires put money into other things and other ways of organizing and incentivizing research and problem solving.
I’m not exactly sure why everyone middle class and above wouldn’t want to pay a little more for more medical research. We’ll all likely benefit. The ”let’s just tax the rich” is only going to get us so far.
I personally prefer a small financial transaction tax.
The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent).
The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes.
The top 1% was 1.4 million returns in 2016. The top 50% is 140.9 million returns.
How much is "fair"?
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...
But that's not how it works for the top of that tier once you're living primarily off complicated capital gains and financial instruments, and it's disingenuous IMO to lump this all together.
Even my conservative (mostly) tax-hating friends are not happy seeing occasional individuals pay 5% or less, which they do, through a variety of tax loopholes and shelters. And because of this, the richest Americans, the top 0.001%, on average, pay at a lower rate than the rest of the 1%.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldurkheimer/2018/03/01/0-...
I keep reading people talking about billionaires "hoarding" their money, as if it was just sitting in a vault like Scrooge McDuck and not being reinvested in countless businesses, while only a small percentage is going towards their 'luxury' lifestyle (which they also assume goes all into useless flashy cars and fashion like lower-tier wealthy celebrities they see on TV who also frequently happen to end up broke... for some reason).
We should tax that consumption, not the investments the return value and therefore jobs, technology, science, etc to society). Or focus on the far wealthier corporations who pay no direct tax through various financial trickery and/or incentives to off-shore it instead of keeping it locally to spend (although most still pay tons in taxes through other means).
a consumption tax would also penalize transactions that might decrease environmental impact e.g. solar panels, or of tools used in the construction of a composting toilet, those being easy, obvious examples.
It hits the corporates and rich where they actually care (passive gains), while not increasing the tax load of anyone's income (active renumeration).