First and foremost you should mention the corporate tax cuts. How can corporations afford consolidation and other malicious shit they do? Their tax bill was cut in half. And their executive income tax rate was cut dramatically.
Rather than paying their employees, they give massive bonuses to their executives and save the rest for buying out competitors or attracting suitors.
It’s not so much the corporate tax rate that did it, it’s capital gains tax (and especially how it’s implemented) that’s the big problem.
The fact that capital gains isn’t treated as regular income tax creates all sorts of really bad incentives. It means that executives are generally primarily paid in stock which means they are incentivized to push the value of that stock up. And since everyone making those decisions are also primarily paid in stock they’ll authorize things like stock buybacks to boost their own personal wealth.
5 regulations I’d make to fix this problem.
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No executives can be paid with equity.
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The maximum salary can not be more than 10x the lowest salary in a company.
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Tax capital gains as regular income.
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Bring back the 90% top income tax bracket
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Introduce a wealth tax. Perhaps 3% for a networth over 1 billion.
