> my opinion is the marginal tax rate should be very high when you get to this point of income, and the money should be redistributed via services, credits and direct payments (maybe?) to poorer people
The problem with this is that the government simply can't do it effectively. We had marginal tax rates that high in the past and the revenue didn't get redistributed to the people who really needed it. It got squandered in pork just like it always does.
Charity and helping those who need it is a fine thing, but it has to be done by people who will actually do it right. Whoever that is, it isn't the government.
> The problem with this is that the government simply can't do it effectively
The evidence is that, compared to the status quo, it can. Perhaps it can’t meet some abstract ideal, but that’s making the perfect the enemy of the at-least-better-than-horrifically-bad.
> We had marginal tax rates that high in the past and the revenue didn't get redistributed to the people who really needed it.
They coincided with a long period of much more effective broad-based growth and less concentration of wealth at the top than we’ve had since they ended, so while the first-order nature of the individual policies may not seem like idealized redistribution, the evidence is that on balance the set of policies that included them was at least less bad at that then status quo set of policies that include lower top-tier taxes.
But even if we hadn't done better before that wouldn't in and of itself be more than very weak evidence that we couldn't do better through government.
> They coincided with a long period of much more effective broad-based growth and less concentration of wealth at the top
And the latter was a side effect of the former; the attempts of the rich to concentrate wealth couldn't keep up with the broad-based growth. But it wasn't high marginal tax rates that allowed everyone else to reap the benefits of that broad-based growth; it was the fact that the growth was outstripping the concentration of wealth. Most of the revenue that went to the government from those high taxes didn't get redistributed to the people at the bottom; it got spent on things like the Korean and Vietnam War (and more generally the Cold War military-industrial complex), subsidies to large corporations, etc. Even Social Security and Medicare, the two poster child programs for the government redistributing wealth from the rich, don't actually do that, because your benefits are based on how much you pay into the system. (Not to mention that the government has raided the trust fund that was supposed to fund those programs for decades, so the fund now has government IOUs in it instead of cash, and those IOUs have to be paid when they come due from current revenues, not from earnings from prior payments in. It isn't the rich that are going to have to pay those IOUs.)
> that wouldn't in and of itself be more than very weak evidence that we couldn't do better through government.
Governments have existed for millennia. There is a lot more evidence about how badly governments do things than just the US in the few decades following WW II.
No, "we" can't. "We" can only do this through the government.
> This is one benefit of UBI.
If you think UBI will eliminate pork and all other forms of government waste, including the pork waste involved with redistributing wealth, I have some oceanfront property in Nebraska I'd like to sell you.
The problem with this is that the government simply can't do it effectively. We had marginal tax rates that high in the past and the revenue didn't get redistributed to the people who really needed it. It got squandered in pork just like it always does.
Charity and helping those who need it is a fine thing, but it has to be done by people who will actually do it right. Whoever that is, it isn't the government.