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Comment by 58028641 | Hacker News Reader

When have we taxed the rich?

From https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke... the answer is between 1936 and 1981 (as a high as 90% for the highest bracket from 1941 to 1963).

Curiously the time conservatives want to go back too.

HN is higher income bracket so they don't need the services the government provides- and have the arrogance to call it waste.

Conservative here. We don't want to go "back" to anything - we reject the Whig history notion of linear history entirely. Rather there are things we want, and things we don't want, and enormous income taxes is decidedly one of the things we don't want.

In 2020: Top 1% paid 42% of all collected income taxes. (1.5 million tax payers paid $722 Billion) Bottom 50% paid 2.25% (78 million tax payers paid $1.7 Billion)

https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...

The trend that is more troubling is the effective tax rate for the 1% of earners is falling (34.47% in 1980 vs 25.99% in 2020) yet their share of total taxes paid is rising (19.05% in 1980 vs 42.31% in 2020). This just highlights the growing income gap between the 1% and everyone else.

Or perhaps it's just proving the laffer curve true.

If that's supposed to be some sort of rallying cry in their defense:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

The top 1% had almost 40% of the wealth in the US, in 2012.

And that video is from 2012, from before Covid, now it's much, much worse, because since 2020 the top 1% have captured about 66% of the extra wealth created.

The top 1% have 40% of wealth and pay 40% of taxes?

Sounds ideal to me.

The top 1% of that 1% pay almost nothing. This is what gets people all riled up about. And the 99% of the top 1% are the ones that pay.

Mostly because it expensive to get around taxes, something the 1% of the 1% can easily afford.

It's not just the expense of getting around taxes, but also the difference in sources of income. If most of the income is on a W-2, there are just not as many ways to get around any income taxes. But if it's mostly business or investment income, that's like Minecraft for accountants.

And a lot of people always throws around terms like "almost nothing" without defining it in terms of actual dollars. Is it like 50M is nothing compared to their 10B net worth? What are we talking about/comparing here?

Trump paid zero for years.

Privately, I know how to make investment income go to zero if you have enough of it. It’s all rather fascinating. Really, the top 5% of the top 1% could do it. But if you have less than $1m income (or cap gains), then it’s likely not worth it.

how much did those top 1% make in income out of the total?

"In 2020, the bottom half of taxpayers earned 10.2 percent of total AGI and paid 2.3 percent of all federal individual income taxes. The top 1 percent earned 22.2 percent of total AGI and paid 42.3 percent of all federal income taxes." According to https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income....

Why do people like you always exclude payroll taxes and state taxes in counting who paid the most taxes. You only cherry pick the most progressive piece of the entire taxes paid

I'm not even American mate. I was just interested in the statistics and looked it up online (maybe poorly) and posted it here since I assumed others would be. I didn't even comment whether this was good or bad! Do you have the numbers you talk about?

I'm glad you pointed this out. The parent comment to yours is the equivalent of people seeing a big red map of the US during the presidential race and saying "how come the Democrats win when there's so much red?!", as if land can vote -_-

In America, land can vote, although not in the Presidential election. The Senate.

Still not land voting. Seeing as RI gets the same number of votes as AK. And both senate candidates are selected by popular vote in the state, so even if most of the state is red, big blue cities can swing the vote.

RI has the same approximate population as AK. What people mean when they say land votes, is AK compared to NY. AK has a population of < 1M while NY has a population of > 8 million. Proportionally, Alaskans have > 8x the representation in the senate that New Yorkers have.

I haven't heard people say "land votes" (except in this thread). Only, "land doesn't vote".

Not a proportional vote but a territorial vote nonetheless.

It is the same in the presidential election, since number of electoral votes from the state includes number of senators.

Dollar earned for dollar earned the top 1% pays 6 times the tax as the bottom 50%

In general the rich pay most taxes: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...

Rich people pay more property taxes.

Rich people pay own companies, which pay corporate taxes.

LA just enacted a wealth tax on 5m+ real estate.

My point is how many times have we been sold the concept of "if we just bond or tax X, we can solve problem Y". These always turn out to be Big dreams where billions get spent and nothing really gets better.

Look at the CA high speed rail diaster.

Look at this one... The government sold a bond for homeless housing and raided the money for another project. https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2021/03/california-...

We don't have revenue problems, we have spending problems.

capital gains taxes

Death tax

Top level income tax rates

Property taxes

Sales taxes

And for the self employed - estimated quarterly taxes

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