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Comment by readams | Hacker News Reader

It's mostly a myth that there was a 90% marginal tax rate. It's technically true, but when the top tax rate was removed they also removed all the loopholes and deductions that were being used to reduce the effect tax rate on top earners to below 45%. All the while the proportion of tax receipts as a percentage of GDP has remained constant.

Meanwhile, the proportion of taxes paid by the top quintile earners has increased from 55% in 1980 to 70% by 2013.

In 2017 the top 1% of income earners paid 38.5% of all taxes, vs the bottom 90% who paid 29.9% of all taxes. The top 50% of taxpayers paid 97% of all taxes in 2017.

But all this ignores the main fact, which is that actual rich people make most of their money not as income, but as unrealized capital gains. High marginal rates on income taxes affects high-earning professionals. Not the private jet crowd.

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> Meanwhile, the proportion of taxes paid by the top quintile earners has increased from 55% in 1980 to 70% by 2013.

Citing the amount collected from the top quintile is moving the goalposts a bit. A typical 20%er is someone like a successful dentist. Sure, they probably have a stock portfolio, but that's for funding their retirement.

It doesn't help that the statistics are always presented in misleading ways. We really need the stats to be stated in terms of tranches that exclude the higher ones (eg. top 0.01%, 0.01-0.1%, 0.1-0.5%, 0.5-1%, 1-5%, 5-10%, 10-20%, 20-40%, 40-60%, etc.). Instead, lumping the 1% in with the 1-20% just co-opts the upper-middle class into defending the interests of the 1% and above.

> But all this ignores the main fact, which is that actual rich people make most of their money not as income, but as unrealized capital gains. High marginal rates on income taxes affects high-earning professionals. Not the private jet crowd.

Of course. That's where discussion of wealth inequality (and the estate tax) takes over from income inequality.

Estate tax won't help you now.

Neither will income or property taxes.

Successful dentists are not much different than fast-food workers compared to multi-billionaires already.

Only taxing commerce can be sustained over the long term, and there need to be tariffs calibrated to insure any currency leaving the land of its fully-backed legal tender is replaced with incoming amounts of the same in a timely way.

Of course nationals need to be taking fair profits in both directions, and everything will eventually work out just fine.

I wouldn't call it a myth. High income earners both then and now have a lot of ways to avoid paying tax, so they don't pay nearly as much as the top marginal rate. It's also true that the top marginal rate used to be much higher.

> Meanwhile, the proportion of taxes paid by the top quintile earners has increased from 55% in 1980 to 70% by 2013.

Isn't this exactly what you would expect with growing income & wealth inequality, so long as your tax system maintains some aspect of progressive taxation.

But the percentage of total tax revenue paid by the top income earners has only grown over time, not decreased.

Which is what you would expect, no? I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here, can you elaborate?

Check the percentage of total income vs. percentage of total taxes paid. The system has become more progressive even ignoring the increase in income.

How can you ignore the increase in income?

I'm not claiming I know what is actually happening in the US, it's complicated and I haven't spent enough time looking at it to be confident.

However, it's true that if there is a) an increase in total income that b) is entirely captured by a small percentage of people, then naturally their share of the total income tax paid will increase and everyone else's will decrease as a fraction unless the system is regressive in some way.

"Progressive" here doesn't mean higher earners pay more in aggregate, it means (by definition) that their marginal rates are higher that people with lower income.

What is means is if you control for income, the top 1% are paying a bigger share of total income tax.

So even if they weren’t earning more, they be paying more taxes.

Even if you taxed them to the bone it wouldn't be enough so you're going to need to tax the bulk of the commerce instead of just the residuals after it falls into their relatively idle hands.

> actual rich people make most of their money not as income, but as unrealized capital gains.

Technically, they make most of their wealth as as unrealized capital gains. It doesn't become money until they realize the gains, at which point it is taxable income.

What's the average effective tax rate for high-net-worth+ individuals if unrealized capital gains are included as income? It seems like people get an increasing level of control over their taxes as their networth increases. Choosing when to exercise options means you have some control over AMT. If you invest in indices, it looks like direct indexing has a lot of tax benefits over an index fund. You can get variable and fixed rate loans against your investment accounts.

It's not a good idea for tax minimization to be the main goal of your investment strategy, but it seems like people can get access to a large portion of their investments without actually realizing capital gains.

> What's the average effective tax rate for high-net-worth+ individuals if unrealized capital gains are included as income?

That's a completely pointless question. If I own 50% of GameStop, my net worth will have gone from $650 million to $12.2 billion to $1.8 billion in like 45 days. Sure, this is an extreme example, but it happens over longer stretches of time to a ton of the richest people.

How exactly do you expect to tax that movement of those unrealized gains?

> You can get variable and fixed rate loans against your investment accounts.

That you eventually have to pay off. The money you pay it off with will be taxed.

Then typically only taxed long term cap gains rates of 20% or less...

That is just the base Federal rate. After NIIT, State, etc it can be >35%, which is actually quite high for a country where the cost basis is not inflation-adjusted. That is higher than most countries in Europe.

Did the effective tax rate change on the top quantile from 1980 to 2013, or did they just earn a lot larger fraction of income?

In 1980 the top quintile earned 44% of the income and in 2013 51%. So the tax structure became much more progressive over that time.

In 2019 it was 52% of the income.

It changed a lot. The marginal rate for someone earning $100,000 in 2020 dollars (so $31,837 in 1980) was 44% then and 24% now.

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