The battle over tax rates usually begins by picking at "actual" vs. "published" tax rates. Republicans love to point out that corporate taxes are high in the United States so our "actual" tax rate is very high (because obviously we're all corporations or some shit). As Thomas Piketty pointed out, the United States Treasury Department is basically the first organization that has decided to repatriate black market funds aggressively; considering something like a third of the world's economy is off-the-books, that makes the US tax rate theoretically very high. Does the Treasury's repatriation of offshore funds impact Cierra? I'll bet she's never been to Liechtenstein, let alone opened a hedge fund there, so this is a particularly Republican talking point. Not only that you can't really argue that "taxes leveed" and "taxes collected" are the same thing, yet most people do.

Here's a decent discussion on taxation in germany. This is ugly:

Perhaps the most annoying thing about doing all the research and reading all the books is that you discover that the problems that are described as intractable really are intractable. There are no pithy, simple answers. Fundamentally, rich people have more power to make laws. People who make laws have more power to determine how things are counted, for example, and rich people around the world have done a banner job of changing the metrics so that we measure economic health by "how are rich people doing." If you're rich, hardship touches you less; if you're rich, you have more options in the face of adversity. That adversity can include "poor people wanting to change the rules on you."

One way to look at populism is as a shrewd maneuver by the unprincipled wealthy to ensure that the anger of the poor turns on the principled.

Investigation finds ‘88% of Tory ads misleading compared to 0% for Labour’