Higher taxes on the highest income bracket basically helps foster more of a culture of Mustachianism - it's a nation-wide acknowledgment that running the workaholic marathon on the hedonic treadmill is a waste of a human life.
An interesting thought experiment:
Imagine the future of American society and our place in the world if anyone working long hours was culturally cancelled and the typical retirement age was 40.
Or you could just look at countries that have wealth taxes.
FTR, after years of working with high income/high NW clients, they do the same things Americans do, they structure their estates to take advantage of as many tax rules as possible to minimize their tax burden, with extremely few of them ever getting taxed in the highest wealth-tax bracket.
I'm fact, when Canada introduced the new higher wealth-tax bracket, the only clients I saw being taxed that high were the high-earning/negative NW medical professionals who were not sheltering their income in corporate tax protections because they were aggressively paying off debt, which had to be done with after-tax dollars.
The bigger concern is corporate taxes because companies will move to more corporate-tax friendly locations if the tax rate is too high. This is why Canada, which on-paper has a wealth tax, happens to keep its corporate tax rate in line with the US because we can't afford to be losing companies to the US.
When our government tried to overhaul the corporate tax laws, they accidentally made it punitive specifically for medical professionals and farmers who aren't wealthy, essentially punishing the middle class despite their mandate being to strengthen the middle class. And they had to walk back close to 90% of the policy.
A "wealth tax" is essentially useless if it isn't a corporate tax, because corporations are where wealthy people keep their wealth and use arcane tax laws to dole out taxable wealth in small enough increments not to be hit with too much income tax.
But the moment you raise corporate tax, you are also targeting the middle class business owners, and there are often consequences to the workers of larger companies as they try to defray the impact of higher taxes.
So really, it's just difficult from a policy standpoint to actually identify and target the wealthy with an effective wealth tax. It's shockingly difficult to even determine who is wealthy and who isn't, what makes up that wealth, and how to tax it effectively.
Also, it's not like the US has a lack of social programs because it doesn't have enough money. It has a lack of social programs because people don't vote for politicians who propose social programs.
The voting public needs to want social programs in order for social programs to exist. Countries with less inequality are countries where the public actively wants less inequality.
As long as neoliberal, bootstrapping ideology dominates, there won't be a public will for policies that reduce inequality because neoliberalism is all about promoting inequality. That's kind of the entire point, really.
However, as people are recognizing that the system actually prevents social mobility, the public sentiment is changing. Wait, let me rephrase that, as *working and middle class white people* are recognizing the systemic factors that prevent social mobility, their sentiment is changing.
It will be interesting to see how the next generation of voters feels about neoliberalism and policies that could reduce inequality and promote actual social mobility. Millenials became quite cynical, and Gen Z are rapidly rejecting the neoliberal hegemony (or at least very actively rejecting the corporate version of it), plus the increased cultural diversity could all have substantial impacts as to what policies are popular with younger voters moving forward, especially as boomers die off.
Even though the pissed off white working class rage has been capitalized upon for alt-right ideology, it's still essentially people pissed off about the failures of the "American Dream."
And while politicians scramble to mobilize that rage against immigrants, "wokeness," or whatever else is politically convenient for those in power stoking and directing that rage. They are also being targeted against the "elites" AKA the very products of neoliberalism.
This creates fertile ground for a population being amenable to radically socialist proposals, y'know, like eliminating student debt.
As long as someone figures out how to frame social policy as "fuck the elites," then there's huge potential for capitalizing upon that existing/growing discontent.
An angry working/middle class with limited social mobility, who loses faith in the governance of the "elites" is
exactly how socialism thrives. So paradoxically, the very folks raging against Lefty extremists are the ones primed to potentially usher in socialist change.
...just don't call it socialism...
