I'm having trouble getting behind the idea of making rich people pay more taxes just because they HAVE more.
Aside from the obvious: "I'm not rich so lets tax them instead of me." The three reasons I hear most often are:
1: They may have "earned" their wealth but they don't deserve it!
2: The taxes fund government programs which benefit rich people more than poor people like roads and military.
3: If we don't tax them more then they'll get too powerful.
Here's why I don't like those reasons:
1:They don't deserve the money they earned.
This is not so much a reason TO tax them so much as it is an excuse why it's ok.
How to you objectively tell whether someone 'deserves' what they own? Who deserves their money more:
The president of a huge company who went to business school for several years, worked his way to the top, hired the best and the brightest and employs thousands of people
Or the the pizza delivery boy working for $6 and hour plus rare tips who always holds the pizza crooked so the cheese spills to one side and never delivers in 30 mins or less?
You might argue that the wealthy are just luckier than average people and so because it all comes down to dumb luck we should feel free to charge more successful people.
Well that's stupid. Luck might have something to do with it. And sometimes it might have a LOT to do with it. The second daughter of a family in china is probably gonna end up not being as wealthy as the only son of a U.S congressman.
But even if we grant that getting your wealth through luck makes you less entitled to it, that doesn't mean that EVERY wealthy person is just lucky.
In addition, luck isn't everything. 1 in 3 Lottery winners go broke again within 5 years. . . Just because they suck at handling money.
Being wealthy requires some kind of skill, why don't they deserve what that skill earns them?
2: The taxes fund government programs which benefit rich people more than poor people like roads and military.
Lets take the military defense as an example. An illustration I've heard is that if you are poor it costs less to insure your stuff than if you're wealthy. So since the military protects MORE of your stuff than mine, then you should pay more for the military.
This is absurd.
First of all the military is not an insurance company. If a terrorist gets by the military and blows up Bill Gates house, the military isn't going to pay to fix it, maybe his insurance company will (which he pays more for by the way) but the military doesn't protect him more than it protects Pizza Guy Bob in New York. So if Gates gets the same protection as Bob from the military, then why should he pay more for it?
If I have a $3,000 care and it's insured for $2,000. And my neighbor has a $50,000 car and it's insured for $2,000. Then it doesn't matter WHAT his car is worth or that he has more to protect, he still shouldn't have to pay more for insurance.
Rich people get the SAME military protections as poor people. So rich people shouldn't have to pay more for it, even if they have more to protect.
3: If we don't tax them more then they'll get too powerful.
That might be true. But without the possibility of world domination, what do I have to strive for? I may as well give up now. Go have 10 kids, quit my job and live off the pity of others for the rest of my life. . .
Seriously though, what does it mean to be 'too powerful' ? Even if youre a super billionaire it's still illegal to build a nuclear missile or raise an army of mutant clones. If it just means having the financial clout to get stuff done the way you want then I posit that we NEED super rich people for this stuff. Google is 'to powerful' in a lot of ways. But without them who would pay for an armada of google cars to take street view pictures of everything? Or who would pay for robot car research? We need really rich people to get stuff done that a lot of little average people couldn't do on their own. All these reasons for taxing rich people much more than average people seem to fall pretty flat. Am I missing a major factor? Or do we all just selfishly agree to steel money from people who earned it because we don't wanna pay anything or cut spending ourselves?