I know. I wasn't going to debate your response, I just thought it interesting how much "job choice" affects political affiliation. So, does a job influence your political affiliation or does your personality impact your job choice and party affiliation?
On the money matter, some interesting facts...
Mark Zuckerberg and Bloomberg alone spent about $550 million on the 2020 election, not counting the $1.1 billion, Bloomberg spent on his own nomination.
Per CNBC... Democrats have nearly doubled the spending by Republican candidates up and down the ballot. Democratic contenders are going into the final week of the election spending $6.9 billion while Republicans have put in $3.8 billion into the 2020 fight.
Clearly, Democrats are not doing this through small dollar donations.
Tax rates do not determine what rich people pay in taxes, only where they invest.
The top 1% have been paying about the same effective tax rate no matter who is President, since Eisenhower. How can this be? Because they have the ability to manage their taxes using tax shelters, overseas investments, etc. Trump's tax return highlights that... but he is not unique. It is one reason; wealthy Democrats don't care...
However, you might have missed that Republicans tried to eliminate the carried interest capital gains tax treatment for wealthy Wall Street types, but Democrats kept it in. Payback for their political contributions.
As someone who did corporate tax planning early in my career, tax rates help influence where you invest, not how much taxes you pay. Under Trump's lower taxes, many companies declared they were repatriating earnings and returning production to the US. Under Biden's new tax rates, many manufacturing companies are having second thoughts, since they used the accelerated depreciation to lower the cost of building in the US, now those jobs will be exported to other countries.
The Rich vs Everyone Else
You are a worker as was I. In my top years "working" I earned a very substantial salary as a CEO of big company, but at the end of the day, I was still "working" for a living and so lived where the job was and paid the requisite taxes.
The rich are not "workers", they are investors. In my peak earning years, my salary was higher than Warren Buffet and Elon Musk combined, but my annual earnings (earnings include wages and investment income) were a rounding error to theirs. Your earnings assuming, they are above minimum wage, were also higher than theirs.
As investors, they invest where they can earn the most money for their investment. Tax them more, they simply invest elsewhere... and when they do, the jobs their investments provide go with them. So, government does cater to the rich, because unlike you, they have to convince the wealthy to keep investing in their country and not some other country.
Nevertheless, the American wealthy pay a larger share of their income in taxes than their counterparts in more socialist Europe.
Europe has learned the wealthy pay what they think is fair and tax shelter the rest. So, in order to fund their entitlements, Europe levies a nearly 20% sales tax on top of the wage taxes, income taxes, and property taxes. Unlike our country where if you don't work or make any money, you don't pay taxes, in Europe you pay 20% every time you spend a dollar.
I wish politicians would stop deluding people into thinking they can get the wealthy to pay for stuff.
The wealthy seem to be willing to pay on average between 30-35% of what they earn and after that no matter the tax rate, they don't pay any more.
Assume anything you can't pay for with that percentage of their income is coming out of your pocket one way or the other. Then figure out how much you are willing to give the government of what you earn... not what the wealthy earn.
