I’m not a tax attorney or CPA, but I have learned enough about the tax code to know that tax increases like this end up not effecting these folks all that much,’if at all.
They go to their CPAs, have them pour through the tax code and find every imaginable tax break they can in those 70,000 pages and, VOILA, they no longer make $400k and they’re not effected by the tax increase.
So, the money has to be made up somewhere and the threshold gets lowered until it hits the working middle class who can’t take advantage of the tax code the same way.
It’s not quite that easy but I get what you’re saying.
Many rich people have arranged their assets to pay income classified as dividends which can be taxed at a 15% rate.