In other news, top 3% of us taxpayers earned the majority of income in 2016
If you read the article, you'll find a graph which shows the fractions of income: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/itOyNXaN9ah...
The top 3% of US taxpayers had a combined ~28% of income. You have to go up to the top ~12% of US taxpayers to accumulate 50% of income.
In either case, this is irrelevant to the fact that getcrunk made a false claim.
So, when it comes to the 1% it can be hard to measure who's actually in it.
We’ve all heard of millionaires paying no taxes, yet the top 0.1% pay an effective rate of 36% on average (too lazy to look up source again).
Specifically top 1% average rate is 27% while top 0.001 - 24%.
The other aspect is long term capital gains rate. Raising that has historically hurt capital formation, which, while it hurts those at the top, creates situations like the late 70’s for the rest of the population.
DRD is when a company, in this case Bershire Hathaway, received a dividend payment from a company they owned, Bershire can exempt up to 80% of the dividend from the income tax.
I love Buffett dearly and I think he is a great person. But when it come to tax, he is a hypocrite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
> According to US economist Joseph Stiglitz the richest 1% of Americans gained 93% of the additional income created in 2010.[44][45] A study by Emmanuel Saez and Piketty showed that the top 10 percent of earners took more than half of the country’s total income in 2012, the highest level recorded since the government began collecting the relevant data a century ago.[46] People in the top one percent were three times more likely to work more than 50 hours a week, were more likely to be self-employed, and earned a fifth of their income as capital income.[47] The top one percent was composed of many professions and had an annual turnover rate of more than 25%.[48] The five most common professions were managers, physicians, administrators, lawyers, and teachers.[47]
Did you read what I linked or just read the title? There's literally an entire section on the topic of income inequality, but nobody took even the time to read the subsection headers let alone the actual section?
They also paid 40% of all income taxes.
The article just says that top 3% of US taxpayers pay the majority of income taxes.
If they pay 60% of all income tax paid, but have e.g. 80% of income, they're still paying "the majority of income taxes", but not a fair share of them.
I don't know what "fair share" means exactly, but the 3% in question make far less a % of national income than they pay in income taxes.
Besides this extreme example, you can get the 3% much lower in their share of income and still be justified for the taxes they pay.
Say, a person makes 1M year and a 999999 people make 10K per year. The first person earns just 0,01% of the total income combined, but he might be the only one paying taxes if the others are below the taxable income level.
So, he might pay e.g. 20% of 1M (and 100% of taxes), while he only makes 0.01% of the income -- and that could still be fair.
Now add many dirt poor, many middle class, and a 3% of upper middle class, millionaires, billionaires and so on.
If you flip it around, and ask, how much of your total income is used to pay taxes and fees for federal, state, and local taxes, the ones at the lower end will be paying a much higher percentage of their income.
There is only so much you actually have to pay for when you become rich where the folks on the lower end must pay for certain things that take a larger part of their income.
No chance it is “fair” and we know who is writing the tax laws.
This is simply false.
One can certainly argue that our tax code should be more progressive than it is, but denying that it is progressive at all is contradicted by the facts.
Many places switched from part of income tax to fees. Skyrocketed increase for fees to national parks this past year. Went up 300% for a weekly pass. You apply that over and over again in many parts of your life, and it adds up.
It just simply costs more of the percentage of your income to live and because of it, it takes a bigger chunk of your income and thus isn’t progressive.
Lastly, Social Security is a kicker for the one thing that is flat out regressive. Capital gains pays zilch for it, and it stops at 127K or so of income. That tax is burdened by the middle class.
That’s chump change for the wealthy, but anyone hit by it is burdened less and less the more money they make.
And don’t tell me it’s a “fund”. That’s not how the GOP acts with it.