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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> This is deceptive by using percentages...

It's not. Relatively speaking, the rich do pay less % of their share of income in taxes, despite them obviously being way more able to pay taxes than the lower castes.

Warren Buffett infamously paid (and likely still pays) less of his income than his own secretary. This is beyond ridiculous.

And that doesn't even take into account the obscene gains in wealth that aren't taxed at all (partially, because taxing unrealized gains is hard). The rich just evade that tax (or practically, they shift the payment date towards infinity) by taking ultra low-interest loans on their stock and pay the interest from dividends.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/04/news/economy/buffett-secret...

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>Relatively speaking, the rich do pay less % of their share of income in taxes, despite them obviously being way more able to pay taxes than the lower castes.

It's not entirely clear what you are trying to say, but as a share of income earned, the rich earn 20% of the income, they pay 40% of the income taxes collected by the government. They objectively pay more than a fair share.

> It's not entirely clear what you are trying to say, but as a share of income earned, the rich earn 20% of the income, they pay 40% of the income taxes collected by the government. They objectively pay more than a fair share.

The question is what one defines as fair. For me, fairness is defined as "how much can one pay in relation to his income"... and then it's simple: when the secretary earning 48k a year has to pay 5% more in taxes, that's 2.4k less for her - and she'll feel that very immediately. Meanwhile, assuming Buffett has a yearly income of 480 million dollars (officially, he has a 100k/y salary, but there's no way his real income is that low given his net worth of ~130 billion dollars, so I just plugged in some number that is likely still way too low), if he has to pay 5% more taxes that's 24 million dollars - a sum that won't even register on any of his decisions.

Once you pass a certain amount of wealth and/or income, you just have/earn so much that any kind of tax increase or decrease will not make any material difference in your lifestyle.

Therefore, "fairness" for me would be defined as "all members of the economy, both the poor and the rich, contribute to society in a way so that both can live a reasonable life after taxes".

He didn't though. He paid billions of dollars and she paid a few thousand.

By percentage, not absolute.

Would you rather pay $0 taxes on $10 annual income, or $99B taxes on $100B annual income? Which will leave you better off?

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