If you taxed all US billionaires at 100% it wouldn’t have even paid the bill for the recent Covid relief bill. We need more people paying taxes, not fewer peop

If you taxed all US billionaires at 100% it wouldn’t have even paid the bill for the recent Covid relief bill. We need more people paying taxes, not fewer people paying more taxes. The other thing is that if we have a “strong” social safety net, that will then incentivize more low wage jobs that don’t pay enough to actually support the person (sort of how Walmart paid low wages, but many of its employees were on food stamps.) Government should be less involved. Having food stamps available for low wage workers means they can accept a job for lower pay than they would have been able to accept otherwise. (I am not saying to get rid of food stamps, only to illustrate how “safety nets” actually perpetuate the very problems they are ostensibly attempting to solve.) Why should I be subsidizing Walmart workers? If we lowered costs to businesses by reducing taxes but also simultaneously reducing “safety nets,” the market would then require higher wages for a given job or the job wouldn’t get done. Right now it’s sort of some Keynesian system were I pay low prices at Walmart, but those low prices are subsidized by my tax dollars that pay safety nets that then allow Walmart to pay lower wages. So my “low prices” are really the result of a government subsidy that I pay for in taxes. You also see this in agriculture: we pay lower prices for vegetables, but due to the number of illegal alien employees who are paid less than minimum wage. The costs of a vegetable should reflect the actual cost of picking it, not a cost subsidized by illegal/below cost workers. (Just to be clear, I don’t care about the documentation of a worker, what I care about is businesses leveraging below market labor as a cost savings that really just passes the societal costs of that labor to taxpayers.) So I don’t agree that business should be taxed more, but that we eliminate the perverse incentives to pay workers less than a truly free market would support. We should, of course, have safety nets for the truly destitute, but they shouldn’t be a replacement for actual wages.. and that’s what we see in places like Walmart. Safety nets shouldn’t be generational. They should provide temporary help, not as a perpetual subsidy to businesses.