The UK doesn’t tax the wealthy or their corporations either. Meanwhile high earners like myself are kept from even middle class aspirations by aggressive income tax.
All signs point to that income tax, specifically at my bracket, increasing in the next budget, leaving me ostensibly poorer than people earning less than me.
The whole system is broken because they refuse to tax the wealthy at an equivalent rate to the working class.
I appreciate that this is a complex topic, but the point I tried to make in response was that these things are rarely as simple as people make them out to be. Increasing taxes on wealth transfers could have all sorts of side effects which are not easy to link as nothing in the economy happens in isolation. I thought the UK was perhaps a relevant example, as France and Sweden have been recently as well.
The economy is not a zero sum game, and the rich can get richer while the poor get richer as well. Maybe this is not a fair representation of what is going on, and I am certainly no expert on the US economy, but the whole "just tax the rich" mantra does not seem obviously true or effective to me.
I agree though that the system as a whole feels broken.. but also, because it is "small club, and we ain't in it". Wealth has a significant influence on policy...
(Or there was another change to the privileged treatment of farms and family businesses, but again, you're not talking about a huge change.)
If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%
That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000
So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k
One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead