Realistically? The number of people in the top tax bracket. There are less than a thousand reported in the US. Even if you give them an average of half a billion dollar incomes each it only adds up to around 5 billion dollars total. Not much. But, if you take the working population of the US and an average income of 30,000 dollars you get a total of 9 trillion dollars to work with. No matter how you work it there will always be more water in a shallow lake than a deep puddle.
And other ways to increase taxes on them sound equally attractive until you take a 80% hit on your 401k when you retire or your property taxes spike.
Taxing the rich is not offered as a panacea to solve all problems, and no one serious about the idea has framed it so narrowly as you have done.
One quite natural benefit, which you seem not to have considered, of taxing the rich, is beginnig to assuage the severe inequality that affords immensely imbalanced power and privilege to a tiny cohort of society.
Realistically? The number of people in the top tax bracket. There are less than a thousand reported in the US. Even if you give them an average of half a billion dollar incomes each it only adds up to around 5 billion dollars total. Not much. But, if you take the working population of the US and an average income of 30,000 dollars you get a total of 9 trillion dollars to work with. No matter how you work it there will always be more water in a shallow lake than a deep puddle.
And other ways to increase taxes on them sound equally attractive until you take a 80% hit on your 401k when you retire or your property taxes spike.
Money is not a resource of fixed supply.
Taxing the rich is not offered as a panacea to solve all problems, and no one serious about the idea has framed it so narrowly as you have done.
One quite natural benefit, which you seem not to have considered, of taxing the rich, is beginnig to assuage the severe inequality that affords immensely imbalanced power and privilege to a tiny cohort of society.