The welfare and progressive tax systems are less preferable than...

"I concede that I did the brackets wrong. I just came upon a source verifying this (http://www.encyclopedia.com......). I apologize for a little misunderstanding." The given site does the brackets correctly. You cannot cite them to forgo your mistake. ----- >>"I.E., I've never seen England so it must be ugly." No. I.E. The English have always claimed the English country side is pretty so there's no reason to suppose that policy X has made the countryside ugly. You are making a clear and empirical claim that progressive taxation causes reduced desire to earn more money. In reality, there's no evidence for that at all because we have progressive taxation and there is no demonstrative desire to earn less money by anybody. ---- >>Give me a solid example. http://money.cnn.com... 28 million dollars to help run a company into the ground. Corporate executives are paid massive sums of money, not because of some extra inherent value, but because if more money can make any decision better made it pays for itself. If you can pay a top person 10 million and they make a bad decision that costs the company 20 billion, but had you paid 100 million for a top person who avoided that bad decision that extra 90 million paid for itself, at least that is the logic. Now, even if I were to accept this premise as entirely reasonable, it serves to bolster my case. As the flat tax is completely pointless to this run away pay issue. This superpay is irrespective of the tax rate. If "company X is offering you 30% more than company Y", then company X is offering you more money. If this is the largest offer then that offer is the largest offer. An interesting thing happens when you vary the tax rate at this higher bracket: nothing. If you're required to pay 50% tax on that money rather than 30% tax, then "company X is offering you 30% more than company Y". Since the added money only serves to attract talent rather than pay for work product the only thing that matters is who pays the most, not how much the pay actually totals. You could tax it at 90% and it wouldn't harm any company's ability to attract such 'talent' because *ALL* companies would be subjected to the same taxation. ---- >>"I made the innovative claim as an argument that innovation is a way to make labor more productive (thus being one of the ways to increase the value of one's labor)." It doesn't change the fact that the most innovative people are still pretty much blue-collar workers. ---- >>"Flat taxes don't work. They are just a massive tax cut on the massively rich." >>From another perspective, progressive taxes do not work. They are just a massive burden on the investing class. There's no need for "perspectives"; we have data. Dropping the taxes on the richest people does not encourage investment or spending. It does not bolster the economy in some sort of reverse-Keynesian economic trickle-down miracle. It doesn't work. Cutting taxes on the wealthy only causes them to become more wealthy. There are a number of reasons for this, one of which is over reliance on the pseudoscientific social Darwinist ideas that supposes the wealthy are wealthy because they are the best and the brightest and they can invest and keep the economy going. This isn't true. If all the wealthy people died all of a sudden, the economy would end up better off because of the sudden influx of capital. The rich aren't superintelligent business minded geniuses worth every penny. The greatest indicator of where you will end up in life is where you started in life. Most of the wealthy people were born wealthy. There's nothing remotely impressive, astounding, or special about the people who do the jobs their daddy gave them. Even if you don't accept this is the case, you should still take a good look at the outcome of Trickle-Down economics which is a much more mellow version of this same general plan. Give the super-rich a massive tax cut and expect good things to happen. There are specific economic markers of good things and those things never happened. It was an abject failure. Even if you disagree with my suggested reasons, res ipsa loquitur, it's still clearly true because we've tried it and have data: it doesn't work. ---- >>Actually, it's just a product of capitalism. In modern times, intellectual work is valued more than hard labor for a series of reasons (I'll mention if asked). It is not that one is working harder as much as it is that they are producing less. It certainly is. And, conceding that the person paid 1000 times more isn't actually doing 1000 times more work, giving him a 50% tax rather than a 20% isn't going to cause him to do 30% less work. In fact, it's going to cause him to do 0% less work. There is going to be no change in productivity and a massive change in the amount of taxes brought in. This speaks volumes about the efficacy of the progressive tax. We can tax people with the smallest impact on productivity if we tax the super-rich. Taxes on the middle-class and poor on the otherhand do directly impact how much they can buy and how much they produce. ---- >>"Make no mistake, you're proposing a middle-class tax hike that will take in less money over all, during a recession." >>Actually, the percentages could be adjusted so that no tax revenue is lost. It wouldn't be difficult. To make a flat tax take in as much taxes the current progressive tax model would require a massive tax hike on the middle-class, to counterbalance the massive tax cut you'd be giving to the richest of the rich. You'd be giving higher taxes to the people most affected by small differences in income to people who would be largely unaffected (their productivity is not a result of being paid 20 million vs 14 million). ------------------------ >>"Wage originates in the value of what is produced for the employer. People make more when they produce more or become more valuable." This analogy does not work. In many of the cases where you'd be giving huge tax breaks, you'd be giving them TO the employer. We're often talking about people who own companies and the like. Further, we have already established that at these pay rates we're talking about people who aren't going to change their behavior because they earn 10 million or 7 million. Companies offering massive amounts of money to compete for the top talent are still just as competitive if everybody is dinged for 20% or 50% (no matter where you take the job, you still take the same hit). You're trying to apply wage issues and middle-class logic to a problem that shares very little to do with the economics that allows one to work 20% more to make 20% more. ---- >>"People are not wealthy or unwealthy because they made others less wealthy, but because they produced or made themselves valuable. They do not owe this new surplus to society." Economics is not zero sum, but that's been reduced to a trope that assumes that the wealthy are wealthy because they are *that* skilled. They are worth every penny? They aren't. We do not have a system where the cream always rises to the top. We have a system where the bottom are nearly always trampled and the upward mobility is at an all time low. Where the best indication of where you will end up in life is where you started it. The wealthy are the wealthy because they are the wealthy, that's all, not super-talented or super-smart. In general, they just got lucky enough to be born rich. Your tortured logic is wrong. And taxes aren't complicated. I file mine quite easily. We are talking about people who don't "labor" and if you worry about "lines", I'd be happy to convert to a log scale. It would do the same as the brackets but progressively move with every dollar. Brackets are for simplicity sake. It could still be easily calculated with a single formula and still be progressive.