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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Only if you define income taxes to only include a subset of income taxes and ignore social security. Further, income taxes are only a subset of the overall tax load and you need to take earnings with a grain of salt as multi generational wealth can accumulate without being considered as 'income'.

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If you look at all federal taxes, as this analysis of CBO numbers does [1], then it seems that the top 1% take 18% of income and pay 28% of all federal taxes. So, you are right that the portion of all federal taxes is not as great as I made it seem in my parent comment, that comment only takes into account federal income tax. But, I believe the overarching point and conclusion still stands.

1 - https://www.factcheck.org/2008/05/top-1-what-they-make-and-p...

You mean, that there's a progressive tax system rather than a regressive one? Yeah, that is a triumph of decency and something we should not take for granted! This is something we should try to do MORE of.

I think progressive taxes are fine, my point was that the rich are paying their fair share.

No, because they are getting wealthier at a greater rate than either the middle class or poor. The U.S. didn't used to have this problem when the upper tax bracket rate was above 70%. It's plausible it doesn't need to be that high if deductions aren't as generous as they were when taxes were that high (for more than a generation by the way, so it's not like extremely high taxes at the top brackets has some civilization ending result - we already know it doesn't, in fact it acts as a strong incentive to avoid taxes by taking deductions in creative ways which ideally also have a social benefit).

How do the counting is also really important. Note, links that's a decade out of date (2005) numbers and the newer numbers look a little different even using those metrics.

Also, CBO numbers significantly understate the earnings of the top 1 percent. Mark Zuckerberg for example has a net worth of ~70 billion yet that money is vastly greater than the sum of his 'income' over his lifetime.

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