&gt; Ronald Regan, as a movie star, regularly didn&#x27;t make movies precisely because the progressive tax system would head into confiscatory levels making the effort worthless to him.<p>Really, if the greatest cost to society you can point to of increasing the top marginal income tax rates is &quot;fewer Ronald Reagan movies&quot;, I don&#x27;t think you are making a very strong case.<p>&gt;  Such rates denied both the public at large from products they wanted, and the government tax revenue.<p>The case that it denied government net tax revenue requires more than Reagan not making movies, it requires a whole-economy comparison of what activity occurred instead and the actual taxes applied against that activity.<p>&gt; I want to encourage people to make insane amounts of money, because that is largely the result of far-and-above productivity which everyone else benefits from.<p>This &quot;trickle down&quot; concept is a widely held article of faith in some parts of the population, but not a position well supported by evidence.<p>&gt; The cost of discouraging effort is never included in these &quot;soak the rich, redistribute the wealth&quot; equations.<p>The &quot;cost of discouraging effort&quot; is very hard to empirically establish without ambiguity, and there are sharply different opinions on what it actually <i>is</i>. What proponents <i>think</i> that cost is usually accounted for in where the various parameters are set; people who have different views of what the cost is, obviously, disagree that these settings are correct.