Something I don't understand that is sure to get me flamed

[tim]

So there's this idea that if we increase taxes on the rich, then rich people will stop working so hard (that the rich work hard is already questionable, but let's go with it) and, I don't know, stop producing all the social goods that rich people produce.

I mean, I think it would be great if just increasing taxes, by, say, 2% on household income above $500,000/year would make some of those high earners say, "Goshdarnit, it's not worth it for me to earn this much money if the government is just going to take it away. I better get a job teaching in an inner-city elementary school instead, brb." But somehow, I don't think that's going to happen.

Is it *really* that easy to stop people from being greedy? I'm not sure greed would deserve its deadly-sin status if it was that easy to eradicate.

And while I'm at it, what's up with accusations of "class warfare"? Rich people have been waging war on everyone else since, oh, whenever it was that some people started being rich. (In fact, that's how you get rich in the first place.) The rest of it is just class self-defense.

Comments

[sethg]

Why would the doctor respond to the higher taxes by playing golf and not by negotiating for a higher pre-tax income? (What proportion of health-care expenditures in the US actually ends up as doctors’ taxable income?)

And given that a lot of consumer spending in the upper income brackets is “keeping up with the Joneses” (if all my neighbors and fellow-doctors drive Beemers, I would feel inadequate if I drove a Mazda), if the after-tax income of an entire economic class shrank at once, would anyone really have that much incentive to drop out of the work force?