I'd like to see a large shift from taxing productive activity to taxing things like pollution. I.e. reduce taxing things we want people to do and increase taxing things we want less of.
Historically, they do. People talk about high marginal tax rates in the 1950s, but few to nobody actually paid those rates. This was because there were a lot of tax shelter options available, and deductions were a lot looser. Reagan got the tax reductions through Congress by agreeing to eliminate the tax shelters and tightening up a lot on deductions.
The result was a massive shift out of relatively unproductive tax shelter investments into more productive ones. Although I've never seen this opinion in print, I suspect a lot of the economic growth that resulted was a consequence of this shift in investments.
I find this idea appealing too, because it creates good incentives in the market. What I wonder about is the kind of incentives it creates in government (what do we do when pollution is eliminated but the government is broke?). Do you know of any good writing on this topic?
The best way to do what is to make everybody poor. Historically, that is about the only things that works. This idea of both high and equal wealth for everybody doesn't seem to be possible if we use history as our gauge.
Tax those whose income exceeds the desired upper limit. In other words, in addition to having a minimum wage you have a maximum wage, where the maximum wage is a multiple of the minimum wage (x1000, for example). Any income earned between the minimum and maximum wage would go untaxed, but exceeding the maximum wage results in incurring tax.
In order for this to work, we would need to include a way to tax assets as well, as otherwise people could just put their money into assets.
But inequality is something we don't want. I'm more OK with the argument that income/wealth taxes are only good to the extent they progressive. [As a US resident] VATs don't sound appealing.