> The point being, you can't just assume corporate taxes are always paid by the rich or the owners of the company.
I was just pulling the numbers off of the source you gave. I'm not sure what methodology they used to compute those numbers.
> Income inequality has very little to do with tax rates
Sorry, I meant wealth inequality. I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
> The increased deficit spending is because the government is spending more money
Yes, I'm aware. Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
> But there weren't higher tax rates --
There were though - according to your source.
> So the time they'd be getting rich isn't back then, it's right now
No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.
> I was just pulling the numbers off of the source you gave. I'm not sure what methodology they used to compute those numbers.
It's Piketty/Saez/Zucman. They did a lot of work to compile the data but they have a particular conclusion they're trying to support, so the data is probably accurate but they're organizing it in a way that supports their position.
> I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
I don't think that really fixes it because it isn't the underlying cause. The problem here is market consolidation, e.g. Facebook is too big. So Zuckerberg has "billions of dollars" but in fact the vast majority of that money is in shares of that one company and what he really has is control over an enormous and disproportionately powerful corporation. Which is a problem, but taxes don't solve it, because the corporation is still just as big even if nobody has a controlling interest. Wall St would still put someone in charge of it and that person would still have massively disproportionate influence.
Whereas if you do something about the market consolidation then individual corporations don't come to be that size and their owners/executives don't come to have that much influence or money. So higher tax rates neither solve the problem nor are necessary if you do solve it.
> Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
The current level of spending is pretty useless. Indeed, it's actually one of the causes of the problem -- a lot of the money is going to the megacorps. It's probably better to stop giving it to them to begin with.
> There were though - according to your source.
On corporations, not rich people.
> No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.
The thing they're lobbying for is the tax dollars. Lockheed and healthcare companies are getting rich from tax money. And the same for Congress, though the mechanism there is less direct. They allocate tax dollars to corporations that then funnel a portion of it back to the legislators in various ways.
I was just pulling the numbers off of the source you gave. I'm not sure what methodology they used to compute those numbers.
> Income inequality has very little to do with tax rates
Sorry, I meant wealth inequality. I agree with you that the wealth/income inequality we're seeing is mostly driven by the actual incomes of the rich vastly outpacing the middle/lower classes - what I meant is that a higher progressive tax rate should be deployed in order to help correct that problem.
> The increased deficit spending is because the government is spending more money
Yes, I'm aware. Again what I meant is that if we're going to continue to spend at the levels we are, and wealth inequality continues to grow at the rate it has, then it makes sense to increase the tax rate on the highest brackets.
> But there weren't higher tax rates --
There were though - according to your source.
> So the time they'd be getting rich isn't back then, it's right now
No argument there - but again my point is that they aren't getting rich from increased government taxes, they are getting rich by lobbying/regulatory capture.