I hope everyone realizes that increasing taxes on the mega-rich would do basically nothing since it's the NON mega rich who truly generate all the GDP in this country. You know who will get hit the hardest with tax increases? The people who make between 100k-300k. Yeah, making 300k is great, you are in the 1%, but people have this image of Scrooge McDuck with endless moneybags, and that's simply not true.
You make that much money as a household, and you can probably live in a million dollar "McMansion," maybe have a vacation home or condo for a couple hundred thousand, an extra car or two, put your kids through college, and have a nice comfortable retirement where you can travel at will; but we're not talking Andrew Carnegie lifestyle here, we're talking more like, oh, turn on a cable TV show and look at any family on there, living in a huge house and never having financial trouble. We're talking like, the Huxtables. The Sopranos. People are still out hustling and working to maintain that lifestyle -- not simply cashing trust fund checks.
To dramatically increase the receipts through income tax, you have to tax the bejesus out of people in THAT category. You have to take those 200-thousand-aires and turn them into 100-thousand-aires.
And that's gonna go over like a fucking lead balloon, because that's the exact thing the Democrats are promising they DON'T want to do. "We don't want to tax the middle class, we want to only tax the rich." Well, the people who make 200k a year don't necessarily feel like they are rich: They are probably still grinding away.
The problem is, the super-rich who actually ARE like Scrooge McDuck, and who actually DO fit the stereotype of "people who can afford to pay more taxes," aren't even 1% of the population. They are a miniscule, hardly statistically relevant minority, and what's more, they have no income. They have wealth but they aren't out there working jobs. To get tax revenue from them, you are talking about CONFISCATION of assets, not tax on income. And good fucking luck with that, because even if you can do it, that pot dries up immediately. Once you've seized the wealth and spent it, it's gone. It's over.
The only well left to tap becomes those people making 100k, 200k, 300k a year. That's where the IRS's real revenue base is.
And taxing those people more than the nearly 50% they already pay ain't gonna make no one happy. And because those are the people who actually ARE out there doing all the hard work, being engineers, doctors, dentists, successful small business owners, they are gonna say "Fuck it, why should I work so hard, if I can only bring home the revenue of someone making 90k a year, when I should be bring home 180k a year? I'm not gonna bother."