Tax Justice in my view is the idea that the tax rate is an inverse percentage applied to a progressive taxation. That is, there is no 100 percent tax rate on the highest earner because that would leave that person with no income. The example of this is the 34.3 billion a year Elon Musk has earned per year on average over the last decade. Taxed at 99 percent that would give Elon a yearly income of 343 million dollars. That is a two-week paycheck of over 14 million dollars, over those ten work days of 1.4 million dollars a day that would be 87,500 dollars an hour. That is a very good “living wage” of over 80 dollars an hour for over a thousand people if my arithmetic is correct. The idea of a 99 percent tax rate on the highest earner is that progressively scheduled, if a person makes what 50 percent of the entire population averages, they pay 50 percent income tax. Even the lowest earners at 1 percent pay their taxes. As simple as it gets.
The Magic Number
By going with this “100 percent thing”, this orders of magnitude applied to everything, which Elon, by the way, likes to use to express his grandiose plans, let us say that nobody is worth a hundred times more than anybody else. Cap that as the maximum individual hourly earnings and everything else gets taxed and redistributed to infrastructure and safety nets. No business owner should pay themself over 100 times what is paid to their lowest paid employee. Or We the People can vote to adjust that number based on the standard of living of the lowest earners. You get the idea. This is the “magic number” a democracy would use to prevent wealth from inevitably concentrating in a capitalist system to fewer and fewer till only a very few own everything and everyone.
Regarding property and asset personal wealth taxes…this might be set at 10 percent for the highest earners and be progressively lowered to zero at a certain amount of basic property and savings considered reasonable for retirement. Progressive tax rates on earnings and assets are the key to safeguarding democracy. The question of individual freedom, of the right of the individual to choose how to spend their wealth then comes up. This is essentially what gives the individual ownership of their own money and property. Again, using Elon Musk as an example, as the rocket genius entrepreneur who could never have made space launch so economical with limits placed on him, this question of “freedom” becomes key. The answer is that allowing entrepreneurs to invest their earnings or other’s earnings in what projects they choose to pursue can be regulated and enabled to a high degree. In fact, this has been successfully done since the beginning of the industrial age. It has also been unsuccessful in that when such “freedom” translates to absolute greed in the marketplace it leads to attacks on democracy that have finally succeeded in ending America. A “New America” is coming…whether it will be fascist kleptocracy or a better day remains to be seen.
Ice on the Moon 