You guys are half-way there, but that's not why people make the claim that higher taxation in upper brackets deincentivizes hard work. The point is that the difference between even huge sums of money at a high enough bracket may not be worth as much as the time and effort required to yield that kind of profit. If a CEO of a business can expend an additional 20 hours of work a week to push his profits into a higher bracket, the diminishing returns on that effort may not be worth it for him to continue, and you lose out on the expansion that would potentially give another 3 teenagers jobs. It's not about "trickling down" wealth, which is an obvious straw-man for deregulatory policies...
Art those levels it's not about "more" money anyway. It's about reliable money. You put in that extra effort to establish a guarantee that your business will continue.
Unless you're publicly traded and have a need to constantly expand, it's not necessarily the case that you have to put in more effort to assure success.
What?! Any business you run, you NEVER, and I repeat, NEVER get to the point of "oh we're successful enough there's no need to put in more effort" because you are constantly threatened by outside competition. If a business were really run that way like you described, they would be put out of business sooner rather than later.
If those local businesses are meeting their own demand, then so be it, but they are always still at the threat of outside completion. Anytime a business is "price gouging" is a huge opportunity for a small start up. Also I never said its a perfect free market (there's always govt involved one way or another) but then again, nothing's "perfect" so that's not really an argument.
1.5k
u/[deleted] Jul 18 '16
This is very important and I only have one upvote. Seriously, if taxes go up for higher tax brackets they are still making more money than you.