"we should be extremely skeptical of those who think that the wealthy are not good for society, and that they should be abolished."
This doesn't really follow from anything you've said. The Chad Jones article assumes that high income is the compensation for generating ideas, but the Piketty article suggests a lot of top income pay comes from rent seeking. If rent seeking is the issue (which given how drastically income inequality has increased would suggest it is), then significant redistribution is required to reduce it. The Klever article is primarily theoretical and doesn't provide much evidence either way, but still suggests the top income tax rate is too low.
You're also not distinguishing between income and wealth. Even if people with high incomes generate positive externalities, that's not the same as people with high wealth or passive income doing the same. Taxing billionaires via a wealth tax, inheritance tax or passive income tax doesn't inhibit their potential future income earned through innovation.
It definitely does follow. I think you are confused about what was argued there, which is that the rich have positive externalities on net. Consult Kleven.
The second paragraph is silly and you should be able to see why. An expected tax on wealth is the same as a tax on income.
It doesn't. As I mentioned, a theoretical framework by Kleven doesn't empirically demonstrate that positive externalities are bigger than negative ones.
It's not silly. If I inherit millions of dollars thanks to trump's big beautiful bill and my family trust fund, and pay nothing in tax, I am not flushing the economy with positive externality. Compare and contrast tax on income from capital (wealth) vs hours worked.
I did, hence me noting that the he claimed the optimal top tax rate should be higher. But plugging numbers into a model isn't the same as empirically testing it.
Deadweight loss is a necessary consequence of labor supply being anything other than perfectly inelastic. This deadweight loss is weighted, though, by how much the taxed rich person is affected.
"we should be extremely skeptical of those who think that the wealthy are not good for society, and that they should be abolished."
This doesn't really follow from anything you've said. The Chad Jones article assumes that high income is the compensation for generating ideas, but the Piketty article suggests a lot of top income pay comes from rent seeking. If rent seeking is the issue (which given how drastically income inequality has increased would suggest it is), then significant redistribution is required to reduce it. The Klever article is primarily theoretical and doesn't provide much evidence either way, but still suggests the top income tax rate is too low.
You're also not distinguishing between income and wealth. Even if people with high incomes generate positive externalities, that's not the same as people with high wealth or passive income doing the same. Taxing billionaires via a wealth tax, inheritance tax or passive income tax doesn't inhibit their potential future income earned through innovation.
It definitely does follow. I think you are confused about what was argued there, which is that the rich have positive externalities on net. Consult Kleven.
The second paragraph is silly and you should be able to see why. An expected tax on wealth is the same as a tax on income.
It doesn't. As I mentioned, a theoretical framework by Kleven doesn't empirically demonstrate that positive externalities are bigger than negative ones.
It's not silly. If I inherit millions of dollars thanks to trump's big beautiful bill and my family trust fund, and pay nothing in tax, I am not flushing the economy with positive externality. Compare and contrast tax on income from capital (wealth) vs hours worked.
You didn’t read Kleven. As he notes, he then estimates it with data from Jakobsen et al (2024).
I did, hence me noting that the he claimed the optimal top tax rate should be higher. But plugging numbers into a model isn't the same as empirically testing it.
Is there not deadweight loss to taxation of labour even if we take externalities aside? Why do we not care about that?
This is implicit in the elasticity of labor supply.
Can you elaborate?
Deadweight loss is a necessary consequence of labor supply being anything other than perfectly inelastic. This deadweight loss is weighted, though, by how much the taxed rich person is affected.
aren't the people that employ/would employ the rich person affected aswell?
And there are your externalities ^-^
But why do we consider them externalities? Aren't they priced into the wage the employer and the employee agree to?
> I do not think those holding those sentiments have really grappled with whether the net externalities of the rich are positive or negative.
Or grappled with much else, frankly.