Millman contemplates tax rates on the wealthy. His bottom line:
The most anti-tax people I know are small business owners and Wall Street traders. These people, in my experience, work very long hours. They don’t really have the choice to work shorter hours – working long hours is part of the package. Many of these people are “sprinting.” They are working so hard to get to a particular level of wealth. They may not get there – but there is a destination. And they don’t want anybody putting obstacles in their way. They have a reason for hating high taxes that is not shared by people who are already at a high level of wealth, nor by people who do not have a reasonable prospect of getting to that level of wealth.
If you raised taxes on these people, they would be angry. They couldn’t “work less” – as I say, that’s usually not an option. But they could do something else to earn a living, and give up on the dream of “sprinting” to wealth. The more sophisticated version of the anti-tax case, then, claims that these “sprinters” generate substantial positive externalities for society from their activity.
The Dish 