> If the majority of wealth is centralized to a small group of people, why would you bother trying to extract smaller amounts of money from the other group?
That's a fantastic question that I don't think I've heard before, but I have a practical answer to.
Most of the wealth of the top 1% (to pick an arbitrary "small group of people") is not sitting as cash in the bank; it is concentrated in financial and business assets: equities & mutual funds, private businesses, real estate, bonds and other fixed-income investments, alternative assets.
In the US, over half of all publicly traded stocks and mutual fund shared are held by the top 1%, meaning their wealth is overwhelmingly tied to ownership of productive assets rather than wages or savings accounts.
So as a tax authority you have to balance getting cash (to run the government) against reducing the productive capacity of the economy (by asking businesses to reduce their capital).
When i said extract money from, I didn't mean taxes. I meant why would businesses target the group of people with very little wealth, instead of making products that target the rich? At some amount if wealth inequality, the majority of commerce has to be targeting the rich instead of everyone else, no? What does that economy look like?
That's a fantastic question that I don't think I've heard before, but I have a practical answer to.
Most of the wealth of the top 1% (to pick an arbitrary "small group of people") is not sitting as cash in the bank; it is concentrated in financial and business assets: equities & mutual funds, private businesses, real estate, bonds and other fixed-income investments, alternative assets.
In the US, over half of all publicly traded stocks and mutual fund shared are held by the top 1%, meaning their wealth is overwhelmingly tied to ownership of productive assets rather than wages or savings accounts.
So as a tax authority you have to balance getting cash (to run the government) against reducing the productive capacity of the economy (by asking businesses to reduce their capital).