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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

> The top 1% are indeed audited at about the same rate as the working poor, but they also pay higher taxes than everyone else.

But they don't. That's the point. Your conventional wisdom is wrong.

The USA has a large number of regressive taxes, which tax the poor more heavily than the rich. These have been steadily expanded. And it has one, only one, progressive tax - the federal (not state) income tax - which has been steadily made less progressive in recent years to the point where overall taxation is at best flat and more likely slightly regressive.

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> The USA has a large number of regressive taxes, which tax the poor more heavily than the rich. These have been steadily expanded. And it has one, only one, progressive tax - the federal (not state) income tax - which has been steadily made less progressive in recent years to the point where overall taxation is at best flat and more likely slightly regressive.

Citation needed. Saying the US has "only one" progressive tax is a bit ridiculous. The income tax is by far the largest tax almost anyone pays. It's certainly the largest tax I, and everyone I know, pay. And that only increases as you get richer.

Most of the bottom ~50% or so of households pay no (or negative) federal income tax, due to low income, EITC, various offsets for children, etc.

At the lower end, you need to factor in payroll taxes as well ( FICA )

Also things like sales taxes or even DMV fees can be significant percentages of lower income's taxes.

> And that only increases as you get richer.

Correct. Which is why income is such a miniscule fraction of the 1% (and above's) earnings. It's all out there in the open. Pick any CEO in the top-100 corporations. Look at their income. Then look at their overall earnings. The bulk falls under capital gains due to stock. Then there is deferred compensation, where taxes are lowered even MORE if you agree to postpone being paid. There are so many clever ways for the very very rich to avoid taxes it boggles the mind.

So go ahead and keep talking about the income tax, they've got you distracted.

> Pick any CEO in the top-100 corporations.

The top is about 3.5 millions people. Being one of the top-100 CEOs is very, very different from being a random one percenter.

> Pick any CEO in the top-100 corporations. Look at their income. Then look at their overall earnings.

Warren Buffet is probably the easiest person to look at here. A quick google says that [0] he made $11m in 2016, and on that he paid $1.85m in federal income tax, and he claims a large portion of the remainder was paid in state tax. Even ignoring his state taxes, yes he paid a marginal rate of 16%, but he still paid more in income tax than the average 1%er's salary. I'm certainly not a right wing advocate, but the spin associated with the "rich are not paying enough tax" doesn't really help the conversation much.

[0] https://fortune.com/2016/10/10/presidential-debate-donald-tr...

>A quick google says that [0] he made $11m in 2016,

The amount he made in 2016 is the point of contention. Sure he made 11m in income, but for that same year, BRK.A increased a staggering 25% in share price. Even if Buffet owns a 1% of BRK.A, that represents a paper gain of 4 Billion dollars.

Now, sure, he might not have sold any stock so that won't count against his capital gains tax, but to me, its a bit deceptive to say that Buffet only made $11M.

when your house goes up by 100k in a year did you “make” 100k?

What's your point? If my house goes up by 100k in a year, in most US states, my property taxes would rise accordingly, whether or not I realized the true value of the home. Housing is a poor analogy as stocks are treated better than housing in this situation.

(California is not one of those states, due to Proposition 13, which is also very controversial and is argued to be one of the causes of California's rising housing costs)

When it comes to "if the rich are being taxed enough", you bring up a good point - if my home rises in value I pay more - however Buffet makes several billion in paper gains, and his taxes are largely unchanged.

The house is a strawman of sorts. The rich pay property taxes too.

CEOs are probably a bad example for your point, because stock awards are generally taxed as income, not capital gains: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2016/09/01/apple-ce...

> However, the day Cook was awarded his multi-year payday Apple immediately withheld and sold 656,117 of Cook’s shares to cover his tax bill. All told, Apple sold $70.9 million in Cook’s stock at a price of $108.03, equivalent to or 52.1% of Cook’s total $135 million performance award.

You’re talking about a relatively small number of investors who derive most of their income from capital gains. (Capital gains account for just about 6% of total personal income.) It just so happens that many prominent examples (Trump, Buffet, Romney) happen to fall into that group. But even among CEOs, professional like Jack Welch (who pays over 30%) will take a lot or most of their compensation as ordinary income.

There are also:

* FICA, which is strongly regressive at the higher end.

* Sales taxes, which are also strongly regressive since (citation needed) the poor likely pay more of their income on taxable goods. ("There's only so much filet mignon you can eat," according to a government professor I once had.)

* Property taxes.

* Fees.

Also, all of our morality or "sin" taxes are highly regressive: tobacco, booze, pot, soda, etc.

Don't forget government run lotteries

Citation?

Try sales taxes. The poor aren't excluded from them, yet someone who is poor is far more likely to spend a larger percentage of their income on them than anyone with enough income to save and invest.

Most of the sales taxes I’ve seen exempt things like food and other necessities.

That doesn't refute anything I said.

> it has one, only one, progressive tax - the federal (not state) income tax

The estate tax is very progressive, at 40% for estates over $11.4m, and 0% for estates worth less.

Many state taxes are progressive as well.

For most taxpayers, social security and medicare payroll taxes (highly regressive) are the largest tax they pay.

The actual article contains charts that seem to support the claim that the top 1% pay higher taxes

barely, and the point of the chart is that over the past 70 years the gap has gone from being being very progressive to almost flat or regressive based on income level.

I think there is a key language ambiguity here. Whatever your position on what the rich should pay, there is a question of what is being paid as a proportional rate of total income, vs what is being paid in absolute terms. Confounding that difference are also issues of income tax rate, vs capital gains rates and wealth vs income.

The wealthy pay in absolute terms, more dollars, but they pay a lower rate than others.

No, according to this article, the 1% continue to pay a larger percent of their income. It is only once you move into the 1% of the 1% that the rate again decreases.

Total income, or "earned income" from a tax perspective?

There's so many technically correct but misleading definitions it's very hard to know what the "real truth" is in these discussions.

All of this is true, but it's beside the point. The perception in America is that the rich pay more in taxes as a percentage of their income than the middle class do. The marginal tax rates imply that, with middle class people paying either the 22% or 24% marginal rate, and rich people paying at at 35%+ rate. Thus, people think that we have a progressive system.

However, if you look at the data in this chart, you can see it's not true any longer. The actual combined rate paid by most Americans is between 22-28%. (It's on the lower end for the poorest Americans, and for the wealthiest as well) Fundamentally, the total taxes paid is flat.

I think most people think that the taxes paid chart looks like what it did in the late 70s/early 80s. In that chart, the poorest Americans pay about 20%, and the richest about 45%. That's where we should be, instead of where we are now.

The percent of all taxes paid by the bottom 50% has been going down for the last few decades.

Is that the case if you include payroll taxes? (We could include sales tax too, but those are usually state and local, so we'd then have to add state income tax, and possibly property tax, and that would get complicated)

That's an indicator of wealth inequality, no? The top 50% are paying less as a % of their income, but because their income is rising faster (relative to the bottom 50%) than their total tax rate is falling, they end up paying more in total, mainly because the bottom 50% have less to give.

I’ll go ahead and preface this by saying “I don’t know” but for people at the very top, are there undisclosed tax incentives to encourage them to spend their money?

By undisclosed I mean negotiated. When you are trying to get somebody to spend a ton of money to open a business, donate to charity, bring a bunch of jobs, etc is there a negotiation that happens to provide lower tax options to encourage that spending?

Evidently, as evidenced by every large spending project since the dawn of time (probably?).

As I posted elsewhere in these comments:

Everyone expects a discount on goods and services when purchase in bulk.

Why should taxes be any different?

The wealthy also receive the lions share of benefits from stability and especially international infrastructure maintained by the US state.

Some would argue that taxes are different because of the issue of fairness in society, and for the fortunate who have vastly more than needed to survive, more should be expected to help everyone else. This is in the self interest of the wealthy, as economic growth is actually stunted by inequality.

There are other ways to balance fairness other than progressive taxation, but those too are often anathema to ruling economic policy makers.

I tend to agree with the idea that the wealthy should be taxed more, in a progressive taxation sense.

Perhaps I should have prefaced by previous comment with “playing devils advocate”.

> The wealthy pay in absolute terms, more dollars, but they pay a lower rate than others.

There’s at least one perspective where this makes sense:

Everyone expects a discount on goods and services when purchased in bulk.

Why should tax be abt different?

Paying taxes is not "buying the government" and paying higher taxes is not buying "more" of it, or buying it in bulk. For starters: bulk rates are lower, in part, as an incentive to get people to buy more of a product at once. Since paying taxes is (ostensibly) mandatory, this doesn't apply.

Ostensibly being the key word here as there appears to be some scenarios where none of those things are true.

2003: The 99.999%ile (?) pays the highest taxes; the Top 400 and the rest pay marginally lower.

2011: The rate is mostly flat, especially above the 80-90%ile. The 99.99%ile pays the highest.

2018: The 99.99%ile pays the highest, the Top 400 appear to be paying a lower rate than almost anyone.

Somewhere between 2003 and 2011, the 0-10%ile began paying more than the immediately higher percentiles.

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