New business creation has fallen along with the highest marginal tax rate.[1]
==because "wealth" is a very fuzzy concept in modern economies==
But income really isn't and that is what we tax.
==I'd love it if we could pool all the ideas for ways to raise the minimum living standard, experiment with them and compare the results in a scientific way rather than just having two sides shouting at each other that their way is better.==
We could always look at the 33 other OECD countries and see where they have found successes.[2] Spoiler alert: universal healthcare, early childhood education, improved infrastructure (specifically: transportation, water, high-speed internet) and parental leave are specific improvements that could directly improve quality of life.
my point wasn't to highlight definitive issues but to point out that it's not always as simple as "we'll just tax more". You're talking about a pretty big impact to the share of the population that generates the most (economic) value per-person - it's unlikely to have no negative effects beyond complaining.
Your first response doesn't establish a causal relationship between new business creation and marginal tax rate so I'm not sure what it adds here.
Consider this: I'm from the UK, and the US government seemingly spends more per capita than here ($22,726 federal + state [1] vs £12,757 total [2]) and we have a much more comprehensive welfare system. I don't think the problem in the US is a lack of budget - we have our own problems with wasteful spending but the US takes the cake there. I mean, the military industrial complex (aka defense budget) alone is a huge cash sink.
And my point is that we already have examples of plenty of policies from similar countries. Maybe we should look at what those places have done and see where we could adopt policies. In a way, the experiments you want to run already exist. The problem is much more about bias and ideology rather than data and experiments. We are talking about the only advanced country in the world where the controlling party denies climate change (a field with plenty of experiments and data).
You mentioned that a higher tax rate might lower entrepreneurship and I provided data that shows it has already trended down while we’ve been moving the top marginal tax rate lower. I never claimed it was causal. It shows that the thing you are worried about happening if we implement a specific policy already happened after we implemented the exact opposite policy. In that context, maybe we should review other assumptions or worries related to tax rates.
New business creation has fallen along with the highest marginal tax rate.[1]
==because "wealth" is a very fuzzy concept in modern economies==
But income really isn't and that is what we tax.
==I'd love it if we could pool all the ideas for ways to raise the minimum living standard, experiment with them and compare the results in a scientific way rather than just having two sides shouting at each other that their way is better.==
We could always look at the 33 other OECD countries and see where they have found successes.[2] Spoiler alert: universal healthcare, early childhood education, improved infrastructure (specifically: transportation, water, high-speed internet) and parental leave are specific improvements that could directly improve quality of life.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/bdm/entrepreneurship/entrepreneurship.ht...
[2] https://qz.com/879092/the-us-doesnt-look-like-a-developed-co...