The rich don't earn money from an income. They earn it from investments. We tax investments at the same rate as the top bracket (37%). If we raised the top income bracket to 38%, it would push more rich to receive their income via investment. However, raise the investment tax (capital gains), and we drive foreign investment away. A lot of foreign money is in America because we have a long history of stability and a low possibility of the people rising up and nationalizing ownership of foreign property. Drive that money away and everyone suffers, but that also makes it impossible to raise taxes on the rich.

they would threaten to move all operations to somewhere like the Cayman Islands which makes no fucking sense

1. Yes.

2. They would fight back, buy all our media sources, and buy our governments to make sure 1 didn't happen.

Yes.

In theory - sure. In practice - all countries in the world have to agree to raise taxes, even though individually they are better off betraying this agreement and lowering them, thereby attracting the rich and ending up with more, not less, money.

And if all countries agree to tax the rich the way they should, we might as well go and build socialism everywhere, because not having everyone onboard is a main issue there too.

It’s probably not possible at this point. If there was some kind of revolution, poor people could have access to healthcare, education, shelter, and food. You know, basic dignity and hope for a better future. But the problem is that hopeless wage slaves are better for capitalism.

Theoretically, sure. Pragmatically, we just elected a fascist insurrectionist, and it's not going to happen in the near future.

Every country would have to do it. A party here in Switzerland wanted to drastically increase inheritance tax for certain large inheritances, and the rich people threatened so hard to leave the country that everyone believed them and now nobody supports it anymore. (They said their children would not be able to pay the tax because most of their wealth is supposedly in company shares, so if they died their children would have to sell off the companies to Cineese companies which nobody in Switzerland liked to hear)

They write the tax laws and buy the politicians to pass those tax laws. So no, we cannot tax the rich.

No. If someone's rich they can lobby if they can lobby they will act within theyre best interest.

go lookup the tax rates in the 60s/70s. we used to

I like Bernie's idea of taxing every trade on the stock market.

It's possible, but usually harder because what makes the uber wealthy uber wealthy is that they own assets rather than have huge income.

So when they say Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Bezos or whoever has "X" billions, they're talking about the value of assets they own (usually large stakes in successful companies) which has more of a parallel with how the middle class talk about their house (an asset) now being worth (whatever). It's not liquid cash.

Taxes on assets are typically realised when those assets are sold or transferred because their value goes up and down and all over the place. And the uber wealthy do pay tax whenever they sell stock because they're buying this mansion or that yacht. It's just usually comparatively small to their full fortune which remains in stock.

So the difficult thing about taxing stock while it's owned is, like I said, the value goes up and down quite dramatically at times. Should the government collect taxes on the buoyant times but then refund them during market downturns? That would be a nightmare. No government wants to be on the hook for refunds during a downturn.

And it can't (I don't think) just collect taxes when super valuable stocks are on the way up because that's not actually cash. It's just the market value if that stock were to be sold. So the most a government could do would be either to receive some of the stock as a tax payment (not much use to a government that wants to spend it) or force the owners of companies to sell stock and make a cash payment just because they're successful.

Which sounds fine on the surface, but this messes up how ownership of companies works. Let's say some good guy CEO (they do exist) has managed the growth of a multi billion business and to do so has brought in investors which now own 49% of the company, and he - the founder - owns 51%. If the company's value on the market rose 20% you'd get news articles about how the founder now has "XX billion" since last year and that they "earn" so many hundreds of thousands a day compared to your average working class person. If the government forced the owner to part with 3% of their ownership of the company in order to pay this "growth tax" then the founder no longer has overall control of the company. It would be 48% founder owner, 49% investors and 3% whoever the government sell the taxed stock to in order to realise a cash value.

So it erodes ownership. Again I'm sure there are plenty reading this who think "so what?". But I can tell you that much of the market value of stock, the reason it has the value it does, is in many cases because the market trusts the management of the ownership of the companies to continue to make profit. If you force the erosion of that just because the company did well then you destroy the way the market trusts and ascribes value to things. Which is why the way governments tax company is via profits and stock sales, where the value is already realised or where the decision to sell is not forced in the same way.

So what to do about this?

Well you can just increase the taxes on stock sale, or on dividend income. But what happens there is you snare the wealthy middle class with the same rope you were aiming at the uber wealthy. Again some might not think that a bad thing, but it's unlikely to be as effective as people would like it to be. You'd generally be raising dividend tax by a percentage point or two on people receiving low six figure sums. Which would get some extra from the Elon Musks, but also would get the same amount from, say, a consultant surgeon, or a recent tech startup founder etc. My point being, there are not huge numbers of these people, compared to the rest of the population that government spending is spread over. The amount you end up raising is not huge compared to what seemed to be on offer when you look at Meta's total net worth or something like that.

The ultimate answer is about ownership. But it has to be organic (personal opinion) so that it doesn't cause disruption to the markets that end up hurting the most vulnerable (via job losses).

And the best way this is done is to simply suck it up and pay a little more for a non mega corp solution to something. Want Bezos to have less of the pie? Stop buying through Amazon just because it's cheaper. Want Gates fortune to be more wide spread? Save yourself a ton of cash by using Linux instead of windows + office licences. Don't like Elon musk? Stop using twitter, don't buy a Tesla.

If you've done all these things I personally think it's as much as you can do. You should put your efforts into making these boycots as easy for others to follow as possible (support your favourite FOSS project) etc. Pay for the online services you like so they don't feel the need to resort to Google ads and on. Unfortunately in a free market such as the ones many of us live in (thinking Western world) the uber wealthy are mainly that because of the millions and millions of micro choices by consumers who are free to go elsewhere but just often don't choose to.