Comment by dataflow

I suspect you (and most people who are disliking my comments here) are thinking way too hard and missing the more obvious/mundane explanations.

The simple fact is that people want their lives and their loved ones' lives to be comfortable, happy, and secure. If they believe they are being denied that, they become unhappy.

At the end of the day, money, markets, taxes, wealth, etc. are just tools for creating happy societies. Nobody (to first-order approximation) wakes up thinking "tax the rich" merely because they're jealous they don't have a private jet. Certainly nobody wakes up deciding we need to upend the entire system of government merely because they see other people being happier than them. They do these things because they see the juxtaposition of others' obscene wealth side-by-side with the fact that they themselves e.g. can't even afford the basic necessities, or don't see security in their future, etc. At that point, they think: "if you're going to support a system that makes some of us miserable, it's only fair that you feel it too."

Obviously, the solution in this case isn't to make everyone be miserable. It's to help everyone be happy.

The problem I see we have right now is that people focus solely on the mechanism (taxing income) while forgetting the goal. Or they focus on the current state, while missing the trajectory. Taxing income more steeply could be one component of the mechanism for creating a happy society, but it's neither sufficient (it's quite possible to do that and still have everyone have worse lives...), nor necessary (there are lots of other ways to generate revenue too).

To give just one extremely vivid example that hopefully puts into perspective just how insufficient (and pointless) taxing the rich can be if it is done carelessly:

America's top 20 billionaires have some ~$3T in wealth. Tax the rich, right? OK, let's say the government somehow just seized all their money.

What would happen next? It's not exactly rocket science.

Spoiler: America's national debt would decrease from $36T to $33T. Which is like turning the clock back to... 2024? or 2023 at best?

Exactly what problems would turning the economy back 1 year solve?