The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority is demonstrated throughout history to lead to plutocracy and the diminishment of democracy. In most cases, they led to failed nation states.
This is historical fact.
This is something the revolutionary founders were well aware of, and they found concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few to be abhorrant to the ideals of a republican democracy.
Hardly anyone begrudes someone working hard and becoming rich. That's not the issue. The issue is a system that is gamed to allow the concentration of wealth in an increasingly tiny portion of the population. That's antithetic to a healthy democracy. That's what Russia is: a plutocracy. That's the model, among many others, of a nation state where wealth has been overwhelminnly and disporportionately concentrated in the hands of a few thousand people.
Take a gander at Warren Buffet's article on wealth. He says he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary or cleaning lady. The tax code is set up to protect weatlh, and investment wealth is increasingly, since the Reagan years, taxed at lower rates than income generated from actually working and making a wage.
What makes an earned wage more important than a dividend that a dividend should be taxed at a higher rate?
Is it because you perceive that a guy who works 40 hours a week adds more to the economy than a guy with a multimillion dollar investment portfolio?
Or does the multimillion dollar investment portfolio create more return economically when that money is used by banks and companies to build a hospital, to produce a product that changes people's lives for the better?
Whose production did more for the economy as a whole, the assembly line worker of the idle rich guy who invests his money?
Why should the capital gains tax be less than the tax on someone earning their living by working and getting paid a salary?
