Taxation is only necessary in a country with a heavily privatized and widely stratified property distribution. The whole purpose of the tax system is to redistribute money between groups, by way of state spending. But if you don’t have these enormous strata to begin with, you don’t need crazy high tax rates to handle the rebalancing.
Cuba and Laos has a very modest 20% top tax rate. Vietnam has the same top rate as the US, at 35%. North Korea doesn’t have any income tax at all. It’s countries like China and Japan and Germany (top rate 45% with a 20% cap gains rate) and the US (top rate 37% with a 15% cap gains rate) that need these higher brackets, because they’ve got these bloated upper classes.
I could easily argue that taxation is just another kind of rent, and states are just another kind of landlord, in a country where the working class has no legal claim to any of the property it occupies. And that an ideal society would have many more free-at-point-of-service public utilities, such that cash (and the taxing thereof) had a diminished purpose.
In a country where you’re compelled to chase a wage in order to have any kind of legal right to exist, the taxation of working-class wages really is awful and nobody should be punished for saying so. I’m all on board with eliminating taxation for anyone earning below the living wage. And I might go further, arguing for the abolition of private taxpaying businesses that depriving people of survival necessities.
