If all that fails, they have their underground bunkers on faraway islands and/or backup citizenships.
Agreed and I think this is a result of a naive belief that we humans tend to have that controlling thoughts can control reality. Politicians still live by this belief but eventually reality and lived experience does catch up. By that time all trust is long gone.
People usually change their behavior after some pretty horrific events. So I would predict something like that in future. For both Europe and US too.
The richest of the rich have purchased islands where they can hole up.
The bunkers are in case of nuclear war or serious pandemics. Absolutely worst case last resort scenario, not just "oh I don't care if I end up there"
You could tax 100% of all of the top 1%'s income (not progressively, just a flat 100% tax) and it'd cover less than double the federal government's budget deficit in the US. There would be just enough left over to pay for making the covid 19 ACA subsidies permanent and a few other pet projects.
Of course, you can't actually tax 100% of their income. In fact, you'd need higher taxes on the top 10% than anywhere else in the West to cover the deficit, significantly expand social programs to have an impact, and lower taxes on the middle class.
It should be pointed out that Australia has higher taxes on their middle class than the US does. It tops out at 45% (plus 2% for medicare) for anyone at $190k or above.
If you live in New York City, and you're in the top 1% of income earners (taking cash salary rather than equity options) you're looking at a federal tax rate of 37%, a state tax rate of 10.9%, and a city income tax rate of 3.876% for a total of 51.77%. Some other states have similarly high tax brackets, others are less, and others yet use other schemes like no income tax but higher sales and property taxes.
Not quite so obvious when you look closer at it.
How much of the current burden is shouldered by the middle class? How much by the 1%? How does that compare to other Western nations? What measurable effect would raising this on the 1% be? What about the middle class?
Compare sorting by median vs average to get a sense of the issue; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe...
This is a recent development where the median wealth of citizens in progressively taxes nations has quickly overtaken the median wealth of USA citizens.
All it takes is tax on the extremely wealthy and lessening taxes on the middle class… seems obvious right? Yet things gave consistently been going the other way for along time in the USA.