>The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness.

If politics and economics were to actually take into consideration this well proven phenomenon, wouldn't that mean that we could empirically justify setting insane taxes after a certain threshold? Let's say that we prove that after reaching $100k/year in salary people definitely don't get happier, could we then take all the excess money to have better education, healthcare, infrastructure, etc., without feeling bad for rich people?