The battle over tax rates usually begins by picking at "actual" vs. "published" tax rates. Republicans love to point out that corporate taxes are high in the United States so our "actual" tax rate is very high (because obviously we're all corporations or some shit). As Thomas Piketty pointed out, the United States Treasury Department is basically the first organization that has decided to repatriate black market funds aggressively; considering something like a third of the world's economy is off-the-books, that makes the US tax rate theoretically very high. Does the Treasury's repatriation of offshore funds impact Cierra? I'll bet she's never been to Liechtenstein, let alone opened a hedge fund there, so this is a particularly Republican talking point. Not only that you can't really argue that "taxes leveed" and "taxes collected" are the same thing, yet most people do. Here's a decent discussion on taxation in germany. This is ugly: Perhaps the most annoying thing about doing all the research and reading all the books is that you discover that the problems that are described as intractable really are intractable. There are no pithy, simple answers. Fundamentally, rich people have more power to make laws. People who make laws have more power to determine how things are counted, for example, and rich people around the world have done a banner job of changing the metrics so that we measure economic health by "how are rich people doing." If you're rich, hardship touches you less; if you're rich, you have more options in the face of adversity. That adversity can include "poor people wanting to change the rules on you." One way to look at populism is as a shrewd maneuver by the unprincipled wealthy to ensure that the anger of the poor turns on the principled. Investigation finds ‘88% of Tory ads misleading compared to 0% for Labour’
As with most things Vox, it's largely correct but simplistic. At the very, very end it gets to the amount of money left over, rather than it being the principal problem. Their graph of deciles were tax rates, not overall wealth. In the US, the bottom decile makes less than $10,500. The top decile makes more than $184,900. The bottom decile pays an overall tax rate of 27%, the top decile pays an overall tax rate of 29%. So. The bottom decile has $7600 a year to live on while the top decile has $135k. Average cost of living is, of course, a highly contentious number, but let's go with these guys 'cuz we gotta go with sumpin' so... $20,194 per person per year. The bottom decile is a factor of three away from hitting the average cost of living - three people in the bottom decile could roll all their earnings together and one of them can pay the average. The top decile can almost but not quite pay the cost of living for seven people. Let's say we add the cost of living of one American to the taxes of the top two deciles - all of a sudden, the bottom decile can live with dignity and the top decile still has $110k to live off of.
That solution would only work if the lowest decile would magically earn double of that what they earn right now. How would that be done? Lowering their taxes is not going to help much. Increasing the minimum wage would help a little, but no one would double it, or is that feasible? Or a tax financed basic income for everyone that is as high as the average wage of living?