welcome to dark Keynesianism. it’s not so much wealth vs income, but money that would otherwise have been spent vs money that would otherwise have been saved. 1/

to “finance” new real activity in a world where real resources are already fully deployed, you need to divert resources, not just employ them. to prevent spending from being inflationary, you have to tax money people would otherwise have spent not saved. 2/

the not-rich spend most of their income and save little. the rich mostly bank their wealth and any increase in their income. 3/

this means, when you want to divert activity to public purposes where resources are already fully deployed — and you don’t want the spending to be inflationary — you do in fact need to tax the nonrich (can be an income tax, can be a consumption tax) to reduce the pressure on real resources. 4/

taxes on the rich alone would have to be huge before it much affects the bid they place on real resources. 5/

in general you tax the middle class to finance public spending, you tax the rich to shape the distribution, because you don’t have a society if there’s an outrageously long right tail. 6/

you have to politically make the connection through an obligation of shared sacrifice: if we’re taxing the middle class who really feels the pain of that, whose lifestyle must actually change, then you should tax the rich much much more to get anything approaching a similar sacrifice. /fin