I’m saying that there’s a legitimate debate about whether Bond-villain, capture-oriented, smash-and-grab, “how many TVs can you carry” career tracks should pay off for anyone.
HN is in general the smartest crowd on the net, but there are a few blind spots, and being able to throw one rock in any direction and hit 9 “temporarily impoverished billionaires” is one of them.
And yet the most productive societies have the highest tax rates...
Clearly, this theory that taxes disincentive productivity does not comport with decades of empirical evidence. Literally nobody who values money says, "I could make 1 billion dollars but since I'll only get $450 million after taxes I'm just going to sit on this beach and do nothing instead."
The first one that comes to mind for me is “GDP per capita” and when I sort that list in descending order my first thought isn’t “those are some high tax rate jurisdictions at the top!”
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?most_rec...
1. Income tax applies to everyone, not just billionaire startup founders. Doctors might be well paid, but I'm very skeptical that they'll be equally willing to work more hours if their marginal returns from working was halved by taxes.
2. going back to the claim that "taxes [...] aren’t first-order about generating revenue, they’re first-order about creating incentives", what are income taxes supposed to incentivize then?
And shockingly, despite the "high" tax rates of CA and NY, almost of my clients prefer to live in these high-tax jurisdictions over low tax jurisdictions like FL where they would keep more of their money. Some of them even choose to live in the EU, where even more of their money goes to taxes.
Income taxes makes up 50% of federal tax receipts, and disincentivize productive individuals from working by taxing their income more. According to your theory, income taxes aren't there to collect revenue, they're to... incentivize people to work less?
[1] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sourc...