How about a tax incentive?

Anybody with a vague sense of the power of numbers realizes that a million people paying a dollar is better than one-hundred people paying a thousand dollars. That’s pretty straightforward, no real argument here. I also hope this next proposal is as close to universal as the last. The purpose of government is to, in some way; enhance the lives of the governed. It’s not what happens but in a perfect world it would be the goal.
Deep down everyone knows, no mater what drivel spews from a politicians mouth pre-election, that the most effective way to raise money is to tax the largest number of people, which at this point is the lower-middle class and the middle class.
All of what I have regurgitated to this point I hope is self-evident, but this is where I have a drastic and maybe revolutionary departure from the conventional governmental financial wisdom. For simplicity and to avoid reader boredom I am going to use round numbers that I’m grabbing from mid-air to illustrate a simple point. Because I’m not an accountant the actual numbers would be different based on many factors I’m not privy to, but the theory would still be the same.
So, to raise the standard of living without financing myriads of government bureaucracy, why not change the tax codes? For simplistic purposes I will only talk about a single family tax code.
Why not reverse the tax brackets? We would of course exempt any family that falls into the economic status of poverty… let’s call that 20k. We know that the median household income is around 40k so that would be the bulk of households. Then let’s assume an outbreak of governmental honesty, OK, OK I know it’s a stretch but suspend disbelief for just a moment.
The President goes on TV and says, “Our country is in financial trouble, we can not pay for most of our programs. We are going to implement a new more aggressive tax structure to solve this problem and I’m sorry to say the middle class is going to shoulder the burden. The tax structure is simple; if you make 21k to 100k you will pay a flat income tax of 50%. Everyone that falls above and below that will pay zero…
This tax code will do 2 things, it will generate more revenue to finance current programs, but even more importantly it will create a huge incentive for middle income people to increase their standard of living without another government program. Dare I say that in five years the United States would have more millionaires’ per-capita than any other time in history?
So instead of trying to legislate the myth of fairness by pulling down people that achieve, why not reward those that are willing to get the extra job and find a way to earn the extra dollar? If we were able to increase the individual income by such an amount there would be significantly less need for all the entitlement programs in turn the government would need less money.

gm