Corporate taxes + Estate taxes = taxing wealthy
Taxing labor = counter-productive + serfdom
“Progressive” taxes on labor stems from jealousy that some people figured out a way to make more money than you. Figure out a way to make more money instead of being all butt-hurt and envious of those working harder than you.
Stop taxing labor!
The solution to taxes that hits the rich and provides for everyone:
Step 1: Tax corporations at 50% with no loopholes.
That’ll get your revenue. Right now most corporations pay less than 20% effective tax, with the biggest lobbying corporations paying ZERO.
Estate taxes are great – you deserve the right to enjoy all the fruits of your labor, even if that’s $10 billion. You don’t deserve a right to never contribute to society because you won a birth lottery into a family that setup a trust fund for you worth $500 Million. F that noise.
Step 2: Tax 90% of an estate above $1M in liquid assets (don’t tax the handing of a business to an heir – they will work on that business to earn income) per heir.
$1M should last a reasonable individual at least 10 years, I could stretch it to 20. And that’s years of not doing anything for income.
So, a corporate executive leaves $300M in his estate to his 2 kids… instead of them having $150M each, they would get to split $31.8M. The other $268.2M funds a universal basic income of $14,400 for a year ($1200/month) for 18,611 adults.
That’s giving people a fair start. We shouldn’t try to give equal outcomes (horrors come from this endeavor). We should strive to give people the same starting point. And encourage capitalism.
Corporations make about $2 trillion in profit each quarter. So, in a year about $8 trillion in corporate profits. If we tax that at 50% (flat tax, no loopholes), we have $4 trillion per year for a healthy UBI.
It would pay for all 250 million adults to have $1200/month. That would cost $3.6 trillion per year.
The $400 billion remaining could be used to improve the infrastructure of the US, build a fiberoptic internet nationwide, build a high speed rail covering the entire continental United States and renovate abandoned hotels and the nearly 19 million homes to provide housing for people without the means to afford housing all in less than a decade.
Taxing the roughly $1 trillion in estates per year at 90% (after $1M threshold) would provide at least $800 billion to give adults with a dependent minor an additional $8,000 per year per dependent (capped at 2 dependents per household – can’t incentivize having a ton of kids).
With this, a couple with two kids would have $44,800 in UBI per year. Well above the poverty line, even if they have 4 kids.
There you have it: a solution that provides for the needs of everyone in the United States while allowing individuals with intelligence and ambition to accumulate wealth uninhibited during their lifetime.