Is this happeneing though or it it just an empty threat that the richest in society use to avoid paying their way? Kind of like when an abusive husband tells his wife "If you leave me you'll never find another man like me" and they stupidly believe it?
There is paying your way and then there is punitively punishing for punishings sake.
look at it from another angle. The wealthy could say they actually pay more than their way as they use less public money than the poor. e.g someone on over 200K a year will not get any of the benefits that a low income earner would. SO the argument could so easily be reversed into saying 'why should we pay more when we use less? '
Now I am not saying I agree with that statement, but your argument is null. its not about paying your way, its about raising revenue for the government to deliver public services. You can tax the wealthy to a certain point where they likely wouldn't care, but if you simply start jacking the rates up to get more cash from one slice of the tax paying community do you think they will stick around ?
High taxation is only viable when those paying it are 1. Here to pay it, and 2. Although they dislike it are not that incensed that they would rather move their business elsewhere.
After a certain level high levels of tax become disingenuous. The trick is to extract high taxes from the wealthy without making it in their face. This is why all the left wing tripe about tax these rich *******s and bankers back to the stoneage will never work. Its not that difficult to move your entire operation to another 'tax friendly location'.
Many large business organisations have these kinds of plans in a dusty drawer for when they know they are going to get a savage sting. So unless taxation is applied evenly across the world by all countries these people will naturally gravitate towards the ones where there is less tax burden, taking with them a lot of potential jobs.
example
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/...veals-plans-to-quit-London-for-Hong-Kong.html
now if that went ahead how many job losses would there be of people who would mostly be in the 40% Tax bracket with a few in the 45% all who are paying 40% on their bonus cheques.
That equates to a far larger loss than could be possibly gained by hiking their tax levels ups