True, it should be simple, and it’s not hard to be simple and still be progressive. Heck, just putting capital gains back in with the rest of the income tax would be worth a fortune (and for the top .1%+, that is NOT earned income.)
It still makes sense to have ‘motivational taxes’ (ones that encourage commerce in specific industries or real production), but you’re right, they’re crazy right now.
We can’t just ‘let them fail’ when they have the savings and pensions of millions in their fingers (often bought from somebody else, so you can’t blame the people on this one), and ‘not impeding them’ generally leads to crashes and hurts the middle/lower classes in the end. We could just start by returning the separation between Investment and Retail banking that was there for a reason. It wasn’t the only problem, but there’s no good reason for that to have been removed.
By the way, I was just replying to @lolipop_jones who asked if Bernie had made any specific proposals to confiscate wealth. My post was verification that yes, he indeed has, just not for the 1% (red herring, NOT the problem, plenty of regular but successful folks in there) and instead more specifically for the gilded class and the actual sources of the problem.
