I find it entirely irrelevant whether or not the tax system is "fair" - fairness is inherently entirely subjective -, as long as it taxes based on income level (rather than e.g. race or other irrelevant factors).
What matters to me is if it optimizes for the welfare of society as a whole. And before you ask, I believe that alone is sufficient to prevent excesses like taxing higher earners to the point where they make less than lower earners, because people would in that case opt to earn less, and so it would in fact not optimize for happiness of society as a whole as it would reduce tax revenue despite increasing the perceived tax burden.
Whether the actual marginal tax rate is 99% or 1% is irrelevant to me in that context, if it achieves that goal (though I believe a marginal tax rate of 99% would be counter-productive, I do believe they could be substantially higher than most places today). I say that as someone who would be likely to deal with the effect if marginal tax rates went up.
As it happens, income/wealth is demonstrably only extremely weakly correlated with personal happiness once very basic needs are met (if you have housing, and food, basically), and as long as things are roughly as they used to or slightly better year over year. Steady improvement has a vastly higher impact on peoples happiness than absolute levels.
That, to me, makes it morally acceptable - pretty much a moral imperative - for a good society to structure taxes to maximize the return from higher earners over lower in order to reduce suffering for those with the least and to maximize the development of society as a whole. Not just because it would help those one the bottom, but because contrary to trickle down, trickle up actually works, and a trickle effect has a far more positive effect on happiness than sitting on a hoard of cash.
Setting marginal tax rates then becomes an optimization problem.
What matters to me is if it optimizes for the welfare of society as a whole. And before you ask, I believe that alone is sufficient to prevent excesses like taxing higher earners to the point where they make less than lower earners, because people would in that case opt to earn less, and so it would in fact not optimize for happiness of society as a whole as it would reduce tax revenue despite increasing the perceived tax burden.
Whether the actual marginal tax rate is 99% or 1% is irrelevant to me in that context, if it achieves that goal (though I believe a marginal tax rate of 99% would be counter-productive, I do believe they could be substantially higher than most places today). I say that as someone who would be likely to deal with the effect if marginal tax rates went up.
As it happens, income/wealth is demonstrably only extremely weakly correlated with personal happiness once very basic needs are met (if you have housing, and food, basically), and as long as things are roughly as they used to or slightly better year over year. Steady improvement has a vastly higher impact on peoples happiness than absolute levels.
That, to me, makes it morally acceptable - pretty much a moral imperative - for a good society to structure taxes to maximize the return from higher earners over lower in order to reduce suffering for those with the least and to maximize the development of society as a whole. Not just because it would help those one the bottom, but because contrary to trickle down, trickle up actually works, and a trickle effect has a far more positive effect on happiness than sitting on a hoard of cash.
Setting marginal tax rates then becomes an optimization problem.