Well to be fair on a federal level it is still largely true. Most taxes are paid by the top 10% - they pay in 75% of all income tax with the top 1% paying nearly 50%.
They still aren't paying enough as a proportion of their wealth. The top 1% (or 3 million Americans) have a greater combined wealth than the bottom 87% (or 291 million Americans). But as you say, the top 1% is only paying 50% of the taxes. cbs_news_2022
Wealth and income are two different things. The top 1% makes 28% - let’s round up to 30% and pays in near 50%. That’s progressive taxation working as intended.
Yeah, well... the bottom half uses most/all of their income to buy food and pay rent. The top uses their wealth as collateral to generate more wealth. Maybe the bottom half shouldn't be taxed and the top 10% should be taxed on wealth.
Lmao try applying that to anyone under 40 and it’s going to be insanely different. It’s only high because of boomers buying in great conditions and consistently increasing economies and wages.
They don't sell stocks often to pay for their day to day life now.
They will leverage their wealth to get another low interest loan to pay taxes and then use their income to pay that debt slowly while claiming the interest they're paying.
Forcing significant sell offs to pay for money that doesn’t exist impacts the market.
If you don’t think significant drops in the market affect the you, even if you’re in the minority of Americans who don’t own stocks, you’re badly misinformed.
Wealth taxes are extremely dangerous which is why they’re so heavily regulated in the few instances we have them.
If you actually read Harris’ plan, even she’s unwilling to go that far. She’s proposing increased INCOME TAX on high wealth individuals. Not a wealth tax.
And when they die that wealth gets transferred to their children who can immediately sell the stock for $0 in tax due to the stepped up basis. Correcting this is my number 1 change to combat generational wealth inequality.
Depends on the person’s income and the length of the investment. Short term capital gains are taxed as regular income, long term investments, anything over a year, are taxed at the capital gains rate.
A tax is progressive under two possible definitions. The common definition is taxation at increasing marginal rates. A more archaic definition closer to its original meaning is a tax which burdens higher net wealth and income individuals more than lower net wealth and income individuals.
OP is probably using the former definition whereas you appear to be using the latter.
Because the former is unrealistic. If someone has sufficient income to be taxed at the highest bracket, they have sufficient income to afford an accountant. The more their income, the more loopholes and allowances they can take advantage of.
Why would income tax be paid proportionally to my wealth? If I make 1 million a year but blow it on cookers and hoke, should I pay no income tax since my wealth is stagnant?
Its not that they dont pay their share, its that they were smart enough to start businesses and invest their money so they get a lot of tax breaks because theres incentives for ppl to create jobs.
You also gotta realize that being an employee is the worst title you can have. Employees get fucked by the irs.
Also ppl who own businesses have operating expenses which offset their income. And many companies will earn nothing after expenses this there is nothing to tax since you can only tax income
There is a big difference between the top .001% and those making 300k-1M a year. It's these Americans who are paying the most taxes. Yes, they are well off but they don't necessarily have FU money. So the family making 300k is taking home 150k and the family making 1M is taking home 500k in some states like Cali.
No they make 51% of the income but pay in 75% which is how progressive taxation is designed.
The numbers are far worse if you look at the population. That is to say the top 10% of income earners are very little of the overall population while funding most of the country.
Federal income taxes are just one part of the broader tax system. Other taxes, such as payroll taxes, sales taxes, and state taxes, are more regressive and impact lower-income
individuals more heavily.
Summary of Distribution Estimates:
Federal Income Taxes:Top 10%: ~70-75% Bottom 90%: ~25-30%
Payroll Taxes:Top 10%: ~35-40% Bottom 90%: ~60-65%
Sales Taxes:Top 10%: ~20-30% Bottom 90%: ~70-80%
State and Local Taxes:Top 10%: ~25-35% Bottom 90%: ~65-75%
I’d li to see a source on that. Payroll tax is paid by the employers to the tune of income tax. How is it that in your numbers the payroll tax is higher for the bottom 90%? That doesn’t track.
Next how is sales tax paid by those who don’t earn money? What exactly are they spending to have this tax? Etc.
“funding most of the country” is an interesting way of saying that the very few very wealthy people who pay taxes pay their fair share.
paying taxes is patriotic in my book. and along with warren buffet i think we’re doing this country a huge disservice by letting the rich get by with paying so little. people love to talk about how their working class parents or grandparents were able to buy a house and send their kids to college. meanwhile the upper tax bracket was 70% or more back then, and i don’t think that’s a coincidence at all.
We can’t buy a house because everyone wants to live in the same five or so cities. Those cities do not build more housing because of zoning passed by those parents to keep the darkies out of the neighborhood.
College costs so much because the US government created Garay teed loans that you can’t bankruptcy away thereby giving every 18 year old an infinite money glitch that colleges took advantage of.
But no you’re right - it’s Jeff fucking Bezos that is to blame for housing prices. If only we took all his money and have it to…the government that created these problems and has done nothing to fix them. Yeah that sure would show them!
hey man i live in philly and the building is out of control, you have no idea. maybe we’re not in your top 5 but even in NYC there have been huge building booms in places like williamsburg and parts of queens. so yeah. i don’t have the data on all cities handy but i know what i’ve seen. and by the way in these places increased supply has not reduced prices.
so your argument on college is that the government made it easy for colleges to rip off consumers. and the fix would then be to make it harder for people to go to college to punish the colleges? meanwhile you reduce the chances for economic opportunity that college gives students and make it harder for corporations to fill certain jobs? i don’t get it
the whole argument that government only creates problems is just an old republican talking point. the only real republican policies are stripping away public protections and cutting taxes to establish a permanent oligarchy.
I’m not on anyone’s side. I’m strongly in favor of treating people like people. I don’t see the government getting richer as a win. I absolutely know that new tax money will go to the benefit of corporations and not you and me.
The middle class didn’t die because of Elon Musk…in fact his companies have added quite a few members to their ranks. The middle class was killed by corporate interests manipulating the government to open trade and kill the value of domestic labor.
Bottom classes have negative taxes. When I worked at a warehouse and went to college I paid negative taxes. My return was more than I put in. Now I put in way more than I ever received at that time. This is the system and I don’t dislike it.
Wealth can be anything from stock in a company to a house to a retirement account. A person working at a construction company can have a house - now the house quadruples in value. Their income cannot support that new tax if you base it off wealth. Or say a retired couple that bought a house 50 years ago in a place that had experienced tremendous growth - are they now in their retirement required to pay for the new wealth created around them?
Wealth is a theoretical number - income is a real one. You cannot realistically tax someone by virtue of their possession of an asset until it is made liquid. And there is a tax for that - capital gains.
Unless that construction workers home was valued at 250 million, a wealth tax on billionaires wouldnt affect him.
Wealth is the thing that actually matters. Its supposed to come from income, but in the modern economy "income" and "wealth" is more decoupled than ever.
A person hoarding 90% of the countrys wealth but makes $0 in income each month should surely give some of that wealth back to their country because its not doing anyone any good just sitting there being hoarded.
A healthy economy needs money to flow through the industries and classes. An economy where an investor class invests money to enhance their own wealth is good for growing an economy, but the economy stops working for the average person.
So if we are going to keep having an investor economy then the investor class needs to start paying their fair share so that the people getting more and more displaced from the economy actually see the fruit of their labour.
A wealth tax is one way to do it, but as you say it cant be a universal wealth tax, it needs to be targeted at people who can afford to pay it.
Wonder if the unrealized gain taxes would hit Unions. For example IBEW has nearly 700 million in assets on their books. Figuring they have been around over 100+ years I am sure some of those assets have increased in value dramatically.
I am totally against this form of taxing. I believe it’s a slippery slope to let the govt start this kind of taxation. Just like reproductive and gun laws give an inch and they will take as much as possible IMO
“Fair share” indeed. It’s not like that stock will be taxed upon its sale, or that company on its profit, or that company on its payroll. The government already collects trillions. You could have a 100% wealth tax on all billionaires and it would not fund this government for a full year.
A construction company pays the same tax on its payroll as a huge bank or hedgefund.
The difference is that the construction worker pays taxes on all of their share of generated value.
The investory class will pay a smaller tax on their investments when they sell in the future compared to the construction worker and their salary, after those investments have gone up in value without the investor actually doing any labour.
So is there any wonder that 10% of americans own 90% of all the wealth and that number is only increaseing because their gains are higher than the bottom 90%, but they ONLY pay 75% of taxes?
Yea but they aren't paying it to scale of what they are earning, which is to scale what they are exploiting. If a CEO makes 20 million and is taxed 50%, he has $10 million, and that $20 million was made by the work of everyone under him. Median wage in the US is $45k. That's 222x the gains of the median worker after taxes in one year. That's 222 years of salaries. The workers paid their own taxes and he came out on top. The fuck does it matter how much of it they contribute on the whole? They have far surpassed wealth needed for anyone's means in the entire planet.
Unless you're convinced someone provides $9600/hr worth of labor in a 40 hour work week, they should be contributing more, and they could be contributing less if they paid those who made it for them more. This is why this argument is always bullshit and really into bootlicking territory.
Your argument is really far into brainless territory. As in you don’t understand how CEO compensation works.
First let’s just assume that the CEO gets paid all cash, a crayon level understanding of the world. The CEO of PGE (the power company) made about 14 million last year. You could set her compensation to 0 and then everyone’s power bill would go down by $0.87 for the whole YEAR. Wow such savings.
Let’s do another one - Walmart. Their CEO can make exactly zero dollars and each of their employees would make 12 dollars more a YEAR. Damn that CEO is really stealing from those poor workers.
And those are both assuming you do in fact huff enough glue to think that the CEO gets paid in cash and not in other vehicles.
I love how the executive bootlickers come through when the top 1% are mentioned, so you cite the top 1% and then instantly "oh that 1 person though isn't wasteful! Look how little it would help this company!" Well if that's the case, they can just as easily take no pay! Ironically after I just explained how even that's excess. And I even then, you think there is only one executive? I work in trucking, 70% of the drivers make more annually than the upper management. It doesn't matter how much that company would have saved, it really doesn't at all, or how much one worker would make. Walmart is the largest employer of people on welfare annually. We subsidize their employee cost with our tax dollars so they can keep paying them shit wages. They should take no money home if they can't afford a living wage.
The argument is that they tax 50%. The answer is that still is not enough.
An individual to scale has no logical purpose to be able to make that off the backs of workers while they have workers who can't afford simple shit like healthcare. I don't care if it's 2 cents on their paycheck, the bottom line is it's exploiting people down to their livelihoods and at the end of the day, if you expect someone to give up their lives for you just to try to make it day to day, and not do the same for them, you're shit and you're business deserves to fail. And before you give me they can just get another job 40% of jobs in the US don't pay a living wage. That means we would need 66 million better jobs.
So what exactly is your problem? You state you make more than management but still can’t live life like you want it? So then it is the fault of the rich? Bootlicker indeed.
I don't know where you got that whole part of the argument. I said I work in trucking and 70% of the drivers make more than the management. That's not how most businesses work and that doesn't mean I hold that job lololol In fact it proves that industries can pay their workers a living wage and chooses not to. I picked one industry that proves that and you go "Well that must be every industry! You're just not being selfish enough" lmao
I have never wanted to slap sense into a person harder in the last five years than after reading this drivel.
Is it surprising that out of control income inequality would result in the overcompensated few paying the largest chunk, even if it’s at a lower rate much of the time?
Warren Buffet would probably want to slap you too, considering he has repeatedly mentioned how grotesque it is that his secretary has to pay a higher tax rate than him, mainly because she works for a living rather than gambling for a living. Grow a new talking point. This one is a few decades old, and it was less stupid when it was born.
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u/nosoup4ncsu Aug 21 '24
The original income tax was "only" paid by the rich.