@djc taxing the top 0.1% doesn't get what we want in terms of financing, but the income tax is not about financing. it's about shaping society, avoiding caste. i'm not very into high income taxes on the upper-middle class, am very into "confiscatory" rates above about $1M per annum. (see https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/03/the-us-federal-income-tax-in-pictures/index.html especially the part about sewing the seeds of the 1980s tax revolt.)
@djc the top 1%, 10% is largely opposed because of the political work by the top 0.1%. the whole game is based on persuading people earning $500K a year that they — THEY — are going to be raped by communists unless they adopt the politics of billionaires. it's a shame that too much of "the left" is willing to play along. by e.g. Biden does a pretty good job with that, no (income) tax increases $400K or less.
@djc If you don't believe me, I'd ask you to consider why we were able to do so much more before "tax simplification", before we collapsed our many many tax brackets, which allowed discriminating between plutocrats and the merely affluent, into just a few, placing plutocrats and the merely affluent in the same boat. This was the core of Reagan's absolutely catastrophic project. See @chrisp's animation, watch the number of brackets go poof. https://github.com/chrisvwx/taxFoo.jl
@djc @chrisp (my pithiest expression of all this was a 2019 tweet.) https://x.com/interfluidity/status/1092519956439130112
@djc @chrisp I think that'll take us farther than you think. Maybe not. But it almost surely will do more good than harm among a wide variety of social axes, unless you really believe that for the good of all John Galt and his genius must be retained on the job, and the best and only way to keep him there is financial incentives even though he is already richer than Croesus.