"since it is hard work they deserve their money" is not an argument for no taxes on businesses. Look at this graph; Taxes need to go up, as does minimum wage. Revenue is too high for businesses, and that revenue, money going to shareholders, is not going into the hands of those who earned that money with their work. And, yes, it may just end up to be a few cents per worker once we adjust things. Doesn't mean that won't have significant effects on the economy. Yes. When you are making billions of dollars, living on a fucking yacht, making more money per second through investments than people who are working 10 hours a day, you better damned well be paying 90% of that income above the first couple of thousand to the society that let you build that business in the first place. I'm not saying people making this sort of money didn't earn it, and I don't support the idea of a system that tries to prevent inequality entirely. The wealthy are wealthy because they made good decisions, we should reward this. Just not at the harm of everyone else. Right now, that reward is coming at the harm of everyone else, and that needs to end. We live in a society where there are just a few people who own the vast majority of wealth. I don't frankly give a shit who earned it. The current system of income is not just a "the rich pay 90% taxes, the poor pay 10%". It's a stepladder, the rich pay 10% on their first 100K of income, then after that pay their 90%. The wealthy pay just as many taxes as the poor. Secondly, the wealthy don't pay shit for taxes, because of how many loopholes there are. We aren't going to be able to get more than 5% out of them until we stop letting them shovel money into the banks of other nations and abuse the tax system to have a bigger number in their accounts. Fair doesn't exist. Deserve, earned, made, they don't exist. You deal with the situation, and you live with it. If what is best is to have a 90% tax on the wealthy, if that leads to the most productive, most efficient, cleanest running, society with the largest number of happy, well rounded, decent people in it, that's the path we should take.People that want to excessively tax the wealthy should try and start a business one day. It's hard. VERY, VERY hard. Most people toil away at it for many years before they're successful.
Eventually, after missing out on years of life to build a business/service that presumably has value for society, you want to tax them at 90%? That's just crazy.
Flat tax. It's fair. The wealthy will pay more than they are right now
My argument is that corporation are making larger and larger profits due to the factors in the economy, low minimum wage, low taxes, higher and better automation, are allowing them to get more work out of people for less pay, leading to lower costs to sell things. As a result, the economy needs to be restructured to account for, and counteract this trend.
Profits in a perfect competition would be 0, or near it, since no company could charge more than what a product costs to make without being undercut by another company. That would be best for the economy. High revenue, low profits. High demand for services from a corporation, and the corporation required to hire to meet that demand == more jobs. High profits is just money going into stockholders bank accounts, meaningless to anyone but those already with money. All depends on how you measure "well". corporations thriving is bad for the economy
Corporations thriving = more jobs
If the corporations are doing well, then America does well