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> Near 50% of American pay ZERO tax whatsoever.

As stated, that is completely and unequivocally false.

Near 50% of Americans pay no "Federal income tax" where "Federal income tax" is arbitrarily defined to not include payroll taxes despite them being a Federal tax on income. They still pay payroll taxes, state income tax, sales tax, etc.

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The extreme case of this is France, where the "income tax" (90B€/year, progressive) is not the largest income tax. Rather, it is the "generalized social contribution" (124B€/year, flat rate). Of course, public discourse is focused on the income tax (50% of households don't pay any tax whatsoever!), not the main tax on income.

Semantics, I believe. The meta-point to be derived is that the top 10% pay a majority of all taxes in actual dollar value.

It's not just semantics. Federal income taxes aren't even half of all the taxes collected in the US.

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