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  "description": "This is the opposite of what they should be doing. And instead of figuring out how to live within their means, they just demand more resources… even though it never works. Britain tried its 98 per cent tax experiment in the 1970s and spent a decade regretting it.",
  "path": "/there-is-no-fair-share-there-is-only-more/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-22T04:30:13.000Z",
  "site": "https://goodoil.news",
  "tags": [
    "Sovereign Man"
  ],
  "textContent": "Sovereign Man\n\nIn April 1971, Keith Richards loaded his family and his Bentley onto a cross-Channel ferry and drove south until he hit the Mediterranean. He rented a 19th-century villa called Nellcôte on a hillside above Villefranche-sur-Mer, and converted the basement into a recording studio.\n\nOver the following year the rest of the Rolling Stones rotated through the house and nearby properties to record the double album that became _Exile on Main St_ , while staying deliberately out of reach of the British tax authorities.\n\nThe top marginal income tax rate in Britain at the time was 75 per cent, and a surcharge on the highest earners pushed the effective rate on the wealthiest past 90 per cent.\n\nThree years later, under Denis Healey’s 1974 budget, the top rate on earned income would climb to 83 per cent and the rate on investment income would reach 98 per cent.\n\nBritain would spend the rest of the decade watching capital flee and begging the IMF for emergency loans.\n\nDavid Bowie, Rod Stewart, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, and a long line of less famous wealthy Britons eventually ran the same arithmetic as the Stones and reached a similar conclusion. Capital left the country in every form it could fit into, including bonds, businesses, luxury cars, and rock stars.\n\nBut politicians never learn.\n\nSenator Cory Booker of New Jersey has backed legislation that would push the top federal income-tax rate to 43 per cent.\n\nSenator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is pushing a version that lands at 49 per cent.\n\nBoth men describe it, as they always do, as wealthy Americans finally paying their **“fair share.”**\n\nWhat exact percent is their fair share? Are we to believe they will be satisfied at 43 per cent or 49 per cent?\n\nAs always, that phrase is deliberately left undefined.\n\nNever-mind that the top one per cent of filers already paid 40.4 per cent of all federal income taxes in 2022 while the bottom 50 per cent paid roughly three per cent.\n\nThey are also conveniently ignorant of the fact that raising the top marginal rate doesn’t actually raise revenue at all.\n\nSince the end of the Second World War, US federal tax revenue has averaged around 17 per cent to 18 per cent of GDP, dipping toward 15 per cent in deep recessions and climbing near 20 per cent in booms. The swings track the business cycle, not tax policy.\n\nThe top marginal rate, over that same stretch, has been all over the map: 91 per cent under Eisenhower, 28 per cent under Reagan by 1988, 39.6 per cent under Clinton, 37 per cent today. Yet regardless of whether tax rates were 91 per cent or 37 per cent, the IRS always collects around 17 per cent of GDP.\n\nThe conclusion is obvious: if the government wants to collect more tax _revenue_ , they should focus on setting the right conditions for an economic boom. In short, make the pie bigger for EVERYONE, and hence the government’s slice will grow as well.\n\nMaking the pie bigger isn’t that hard, either. America’s private economy is legendary. All Congress has to do is get out of the way. Attempt to run a balanced budget. Restore credibility. Make it easier for businesses and individuals to be productive. REMOVE idiotic laws instead of creating new ones.\n\nBut they’re not interested in any of those things.\n\nCongress has documented evidence of hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud. Yet they do nothing. They have also pledged to do nothing about Social Security – which is set to run out of money in six years.\n\nThe regulatory code in the Land of the Free already runs over 188,000 pages. Yet they expand it every session.\n\nThis is the opposite of what they should be doing. And instead of figuring out how to live within their means, they just demand more resources… even though it never works.\n\nBritain tried its 98 per cent tax experiment in the 1970s and spent a decade regretting it.\n\nIronically the current Labour government has forgotten that painful lesson: they recently abolished the 110-year-old “non-dom” regime, and more than 10,000 millionaires have already left the country.\n\nIn the United States, Elizabeth Warren’s Ultra-Millionaire Tax proposal does not just impose a wealth tax. It bundles her wealth tax with an additional 40 per cent exit tax on anyone who renounces US citizenship.\n\nYou do not create a 40 per cent tollbooth at the border unless you fully expect people to try to walk through it.\n\nThese are not serious ideas to grow an economy. Rather, they are insidious policies designed to trap people in a system which steals their prosperity.\n\nThat is why a Plan B makes so much sense.",
  "title": "There Is No ‘Fair Share’ – There Is Only ‘More’",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-22T04:30:13.127Z"
}