Check This Out And Think About It

SEE HERE The top 1% of income earners earn 19.4% of the income but pay fully 41% of all the income taxes paid. The impact of increasing their taxes will actually be to reduce the percentage of their income that they pay in taxes. I know that sounds strange but the kind of economic thinking that says increasing taxes won't cause the people being taxed to change their behavior is just silly.

When I was in the Army back in the high marginal tax rate years and the draft was in force I had a fellow soldier in my barracks that talked about the fact that the marginal tax rates on his dad became so high (70% at some level) that his dad would stop working in September because it was just pointless. So his dad got a three month vacation and the government got nothing. That's just one example of the kind of behavior that high marginal rates induce in the wealthy, who after all don't have to work at all ... that's what being wealthy means.

The people that think about these things tend to use inaccurate and static models that don't map well to the real world. It would be better if they actually used real data from the real world instead of computer models (yeah I know that's the same problem with Global Warming ... computer models as I used to say years and years ago when I was modeling various weapon system predictions GIGO doesn't mean "Garbage In Garbage Out", it means "Garbage In Gospel Out."). The basic rule with computer models is that you should never never trust them until the have been thoroughly validated against real data. A BIT MORE