The Paradise Papers: How Ridiculously Easy It Is for the Rich to Avoid Taxes
What really annoys me is the slope of taxation in most developed countries and how it just suddenly stops going up after your salary exceeds around $150K.<p>If you earn less than $10K, you pay 0%; that makes sense, then if you earn $150K, you pay close to 50%... OK you could argue that this still makes sense. But then if you earn $200 million per year, you still only pay 50% tax - This makes no sense; the tax rate should follow a Lorenz curve which mirrors and offsets income inequality.<p>To earn $100K+ as a professional using nothing but your brain is bastard-hard. It takes a toll mentally.<p>Someone who owns stocks and is earning $500K+ per year from dividend payments while sitting around in their underwear all day doing nothing should be taxed at a much higher rate than someone who earns $150K by mutilating their brain every day. That seems extremely obvious to me.<p>The most infuriating thing about the current tax system is that the magical $150K number (where the tax rate suddenly levels off) is in fact the exact point after which earning money starts to get easier. This is exactly the point when the tax rates should start really sloping up - Not the point where they should level off!<p>Also, I think that the argument about protecting rich people so that they can have extra money to invest back in the economy is no longer valid. With innovations in crowd funding, large numbers of people can now easily pool their resources together to fund very significant and meaningful projects. Rich people these days are only interested in monopolising markets; not adding value.