France: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/31/france-drops-7...

UK: https://obr.uk/box/effect-of-the-additional-rate-of-income-t...

Sweden: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/course/seimAEJ17wealth.pdf

It's interesting to note that even when these tax schemes were repealed, the damage had already been done and the wealth did not return.

Here's a real plan for America:

Step 1: have a tax rate that's a little less than our peers

Step 2: return spending to pre-Covid rates circa 2019

Japan: 20%

China: 20%

India: 13%

UK: 24%

Italy: 26%

Germany: 26%

France: 30%

Then there's Canada of course... 50% with a proposal to make it 66% in 2026. Let's see how that works out!

https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/questions-and-answers-on-the-ne...

Edit: unautocorrect

As happens in any market with limited supply, which generally means desirable land and luxury goods.

Why can't they tax something that _cant_ be moved elsewhere, like property ownership?

1. Because any tax has to be politically palatable to voters, so therefore needs to exclusively target non-voters.

2. Because even if the above is satisfied, there are a large number of voters whose livelihoods are catering to non-voters.

but in general the US tax rate on the middle class is low compared to Europe

Nothing at all supports that "the rich move their wealth somewhere else"

Lack of housing because it's a profitable investment class that rises in value due to lack of supply? Obviously it's the fault of NIMBYs alone and not political policy pushed by lobbying groups.

Healthcare too expensive? Totally not the fault of private equity bleeding care networks dry and public health insurance companies denying coverage to fund share buybacks and CEO raises, so it must be nurses striking for pay or the government for paying too little on Medicare.

The point is that if enough rich countries said "fuck this shit, pay up and fuck off out of politics forever", the rich can't leave. They're stuck here, on Earth, with the poors. That's not going to change anytime soon, so the only thing stopping these countries from reigning the issue in is cowardice.

Penalized by group action against defectors.

Which is to say something like this should come from the WTO, or not at all.

Anything less has too great incentives for defection.

But do you have actual evidence that we need it? (Instead of just "nice to have".) Because everybody just repeats that without evidence, like the OP.

There are plenty of reasons to expect the OP's prediction not to hold. I don't know how things play out in practice, and I don't think I've ever seen anybody that knows it.

Also your UK link does not support your argument:

> Weaker-than-expected tax liabilities from additional rate taxpayers are not necessarily an indicator of an unexpectedly low yield from the 50p rate. Incomes for those earning above £150,000 could be depressed for other reasons. For example, high income earners are more likely to derive a higher proportion of income from savings, dividends and other investments – and these have been much weaker in recent years than employment income.

a tax credit of more than 130K USD ... for most expats this seems like completely negating their US taxe burden, no?

Sure you can move cash away but even that can be taxed with an 'exit' tax.

The only reason it doesn't work is because the will is not there to make it:

1. Unexpected

2. With no baked in loopholes

Come to our country - have our police and courts and soldiers protect you wealth - all for free.

Oh - and because you are not paying tax - can I borrow some of that wealth please so I can pay for the stuff I'm providing for you free - I'll give you a healthy return.

The rich benefit the most from civilisation - and it costs - you can't just keep running from country to country hollowing it out for ever - eventually there will be nowhere left you can free ride.

Oh and in terms of the charts where you increase a particular tax and revenue goes up in the short term and down later - that's because people adapt - they find new ways to avoid tax ( yep including to pretend to have left the country ).

Just bwcause they run, that's not a reason to stop pursing them.

Better then nothing

Or in the case of Abramovich - allegedly create a whole circular set of sham companies to avoid paying VAT on your super yacht.

See https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-06-19/cyp...

You've fallen victim to the false dichotomy. I don't see anyone argue the wealthy shouldn't pay any tax at all.

This renders the 2nd paragraph wrong. And then 3rd paragraph wrong too.

> you can't just keep running from country to country hollowing it out for ever - eventually there will be nowhere left you can free ride.

Depends how much time it takes to run from one country to another, and what you mean by "for ever" - if it takes you a year to move from one country to another and you live for 100 years, you need 100 countries. Pardon my humorous remark, I know this is not the point; but the actual argument is easier to counter: we don't have a single government for the Earth. We don't have a united dominating force to unify taxes in one civilization and sanction or isolate from the other civilizations for hosting the rich.

IMO the education is poor, producing stupid societies electing the governments which are incompetent, corrupt and largely sympathizing with the rich.

And sure - while you could move from one country to another like a parasite finding a new host, and cycle around as the original host recovers - the key questions is whether that results in a few people owning more and more as a result, and paying a lower and lower marginal rate until civilisation collapses. ( or the rich decide to take the rains of power instead to keep the society they benefit from so hugely afloat ).

> IMO the education is poor, producing stupid societies electing the governments which are incompetent, corrupt and largely sympathizing with the rich.

I think you underestimate the level to which the rich judicously share their wealth in order to influence people and policy.

But besides raising capital, taxation reduces wealth inequality, which is itself beneficial as it makes society more democratic. Reducing wealth inequality reduces the concentration of power, which is better for everyone (except for the 1%).

Still, when redistributing wealth, it’s prudent to address the risk of capital flight. It’s not an insurmountable challenge. Policy can address it through: 1) financial controls 2) coordinated international efforts to raise taxes on the wealthy, and 3) harsher measures like nationalization and capital levies.

Yes, the results are always the same: Europe consistently runs lower budget deficits, yet provides greater benefits to their citizens. How awful for them.

https://www.cato.org/blog/spending-debt-oecd

https://oecdstatistics.blog/2023/02/02/sizing-up-welfare-sta...

There is an asymmetry between a government's revenue and its expenses. Revenue can increase arbitrarily if the government is allowed to take out unlimited debt. The amount a government can tax is limited first by the size of its country's economy. There is a maximum amount of revenue you can collect via taxation, and after a certain point increasing taxation decreases revenue. Countries also exist in the context of the rest of the world and there is a market for business. If the tax rate is not competitive businesses and people will leave, although this is over a longer time horizon.

In terms of the possibilities overspending is far more likely than undertaxing because you can spend an infinite amount, but you can only undershoot your optimal tax rate by a finite amount. Both are probably happening right now. The amount that the US government is undertaxing compared to its theoretical optimum might not even balance the current budget.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Basically unchanged for 70+ years, and far lower historically. Meanwhile significant growth in real GDP per capita and therefore real government receipts per capita.

The change isn't that the government is collecting less money. They get more than ever. But growth in government spending has outstripped it, and it has been getting worse rather than better.

cough Universal single-payer healthcare with aggressive, adversarial price negotiation.

Hence the propensity to sink growing amounts of GDP into paying an ever-heightening stack of middlemen to provide medical care at market prices... instead of simplifying the stack and saving money.

The US government created a mandate, then allowed it to metastasize as health care became more technical and expensive, and is now in the business of sticking its fingers in its ears and pretending there’s not a financial problem.

https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

[1] https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1179450.html (very long; you’ll need to get to at least part 2 to see the relevance)

The government is collecting less spending relative to taxes. A deficit is a difference between the two. Logically addressing either side would improve the deficit. However the ruling class prefers hoarding wealth, financing wars, and cutting social programs.

The actual problem is that even a lot of the "social programs" don't ultimately go to the poor. They require specific services that divert the money to contractors or landlords, or go to affluent retirees who don't really need the money. And, of course, the defense budget is entirely out of hand as well -- but why should we extract more from the economy to fund things that ought not to be funded?

The bottom 50% of incomes get 2.5% of GDP. Seems proper to me.

When I asked for it source, it replied, "The Distribution of Household Income, 2019," by the Congressional Budget Office.

I think that's fair in the context of this thread, given the present distribution realities, the bottom 50% can't contribute to tax revenue. Conversely and a bit more subtle, the top 50% ability to save doesn't seem to be impaired by their >97% contribution to revenue.

> As programmers should know better than anyone, most of the wealth in the world is in the form of people and their capacity to work on teams that solve practical problems

I'm looking at this as a practical matter, I'm far from moralism and moral philosophy so I can't really relate to your argument above.

With current level of debt it does not matter. Taxes should be rised for everyone if huge cuts in expenses are not done.

So the whole "cutting wasteful spending" thing... ssss yeah... not really working out I'd say.

Tech allows winner-takes-all effects in many different markets (and runaway situations where labor cannot catch up at all) - you either have to have very strong antitrust (which is still not possible in some places), or basically strong redistribution (i.e. taxation of wealth in order to redistribute) to maintain a reasonable (note: not equal, but a reasonable degree of inequality - closer to the model that existed from the 1940s-1970s) distribution of wealth in society.

Now there is something to be said for making sure that spending is effective, but this must be engaged with in good faith; that is, changes should be made with a scalpel after gathering plenty of data supporting the change in question. Proclaiming ineffectiveness without data to ground the claim and then using that as an excuse to make broad cuts is a great way to make any dysfunction even worse.

Was there so much more that private industry "will not fill" in 2024 vs 2009? How about vs 1999? (1.7 trillion budget). We can't attribute the difference to inflation: the US government's inflation calculator says 1.7 trillion in 1999 is 3.3 trillion today.

No one is arguing that the federal government doesn't need to spend some money. But this truth has no relevance to the absurd out of control spending we're witnessing today.

That's selective apples to oranges

Deficit as % of GDP:

2009 - 10%, 2011 - 8.6%, 2012 - 6.7%, 2013 - 4% ... 2019 - 4.6%, 2020 - 15%, 2021 - 12%, 2022 - 5.4%, 2023 - 6%.

If extreme spending was cut, the debt would be zero.

So what do you mean be "extreme wealth"? Companies? Dividend payouts? House? Yachts?

I agree that luxury items that are out of reach of the middle class (eg sport cars etc...) should be taxed highly, but a toy that a rich person can buy vs a rich person investing money into his own or other companies is a problem if you want to tax that since no-one will then create new companies and invest in R&D.

Most regular people could sit down and cut a billion dollars of dumb shit out of the budget in a few hours (every Congress person has their little pet projects they slide in to omni bills).

The fixes needed for this are massive, and the pain will be felt by everyone. Even taking the harshed path against the 1% will still leave plenty of pain for average folks.

The collateral loan -> invested -> growth, collateral loan -> invested -> growth cycle doesn't just result in tax avoidance on a one-time basis. It's a way to indefinitely grow capital at a higher rate, by pushing taxes further and further into the future.

And when any wealth gains are finally accounted for as taxable income, it's a one time tax that doesn't reflect all the compounding. So a huge time-value of money break.

So there is a compounding of the tax that is avoided over time, despite actual liquidity accessed and deployed all along.

This is one of the primary loopholes that lets wealth gains made from capital get taxed far below wealth created by labor (which gets very reliably taxed, and at higher rates). The percentage of wealth growth that actually gets taxed as a running number keeps growing, despite the ability to make those gains liquid via loans.

Imagine if you could do labor, then instead of taking your income and getting taxed, accept loan proceeds against your "delayed" salary, and invest the net gain from not being taxed. Indefinitely. (With interest on your loan, cancelled out by the "interest" on your delayed salary.)

That would be like being able to choose to pay your own IRA instead of paying taxes.

That's how the unrealized (but real) wealth gains -> leverage (the practical and very real realization) cycle works.

Significant loans on collateral are liquidity events.

In general, any loan that was taxed up front as income, could be paired with counting loan payments on the principle as an expense against income. (And if the loan was for business, not personal, interest would also be an expense.)

This would make loans tax neutral vs. other ways of getting money out of assets.

It would eliminate the practice of cycles of leverage that lets the rich grow their wealth, use that to grow more wealth, over and over, while pushing taxation into the future indefinitely.

And it would make loans less attractive to take out (the upfront tax), and yet much easier to pay off (symmetric tax break for paying down debt). Which would result in a much less leveraged, more resilient, economy.

capitalism is meant to be organic thing like a bacteria. a self-organizing network. one cannot legislate nature, one cannot legislate human nature. Imagine making crimes illegal and then nobody committing crimes. Imagine making it illegal to change lanes without using your turn signal.

a democracy can give an antibiotic by dr. democracy to clear the infection, that is the nature of control here .. but if it's a nasty bug.. the bug will veto the doctor

We have a system of laws that undergird the economic system - the legal protection of private property being the main one. Private property requires a monopoly of violence to enforce.

When capitalism colonizes a legal system, it necessarily creates the incentives for the legal system to adopt laws to maintain itself. If for some reason private property was not legally enforceable, capitalism wouldn't get off the ground.

It was probably meant in the manner of: "the purpose of a system, is what it does"...

I.e. regardless of how it evolved (system of laws written with good intent, or system of laws organically grown out of corruption and lobbying...) what capitalism does now is its purpose, and we shouldn't expect it to be meant to do anything different.

> capitalism [...] necessarily creates the incentives for the legal system to adopt laws to maintain itself

Agree

> If for some reason private property was not legally enforceable, capitalism wouldn't get off the ground

I think this makes as much sense as saying: "if money wasn't a thing, capitalism wouldn't get off the ground".

Technically true, neither capitalism nor feudalism would be able to get off the ground, but "private property not enforceable" evokes images of thugs stealing your property... The truth is that the first few people (or group thereof) who accumulate a commodity (grain, livestock, widgets, etc.) would also be the first who would be able to bribe/pay thugs with a small share of their commodities, to help protect from (deny access to) others in the community.

The monopoly of violence (and legal authority) would grow out of the initial group.

In the same way, even if money was going to be abolished, any other commodity would just take its place, and rebuild capitalism with it. It is tricky to wrestle democratic control back, and move on from capitalism.

There is obviously both - as you say it's the difference between two numbers - and sure how you portray that differences is often politicised - just as you are doing now.

Also remember there is borrowing in the equation - it's not just money in the system, but the ability to spend made up money today based on future promises, the with the rich benefitting from the interest on that debt.

ie those with assets benefit twice from a gap between spending and taxation - they get to not pay their way, and also get a nice return on lending the money then didn't pay in tax to pay for the necessary spending!

This is quite the take.

Do you run your household as “there is no ‘overspending.’ There is only under-earning.”

Do you have numbers for that? Even ignoring the issues with lots of wealth being paper wealth that cannot be translated into any kind of realized gains, and any 2nd order effects, the wealth (stock, can be depleted once) is not even in the same ballpark esp. given the deficit (flow, keeps happening).