That sounds fairly awful. The top 1% of earners pay 45% of income tax (US figure). Why would you want laborers to pay so much more tax?
Average tax rate paid by billionaires in the US is close to 8%
https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/briefing-room/2021/09/23/new-...
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
> The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 25.9 percent average rate, nearly eight times higher than the 3.3 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers
> The top 1 percent’s income share rose from 22.2 percent in 2020 to 26.3 percent in 2021 and its share of federal income taxes paid rose from 42.3 percent to 45.8 percent.
The post I was replying to suggested that everyone pay the same tax rate. I'm opposed to this. Progressive taxes are more fair, due to the marginal value of money.
Billionaires get richer through asset appreciation, not income. The White House report is focusing on how fast the rich are getting richer and that's how they arrived at 8%.
A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%, whereas a wealthy person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%. And that is if they realize the gains at all, because their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.
Our current system (in which long term capital gains tax is much lower than income tax) rewards the owner class and punishes the workers.
The figures are misleading because if you have low income, your effective tax rate is indeed lower than the wealthy. But then you're barely surviving anyway. So if you're poor, you're screwed because you're poor. If you have a livable income, you're screwed because of high taxes. But if you're wealthy, the system exists to serve you.
You will discover that the numbers are reported correctly.
> A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%
The bottom 50% are taxed at 3.35% of income. That's the IRS' number, not something "meticulously crafted by a right-wing think tank". Or completely made up.
> their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.
Good. It would be an absolute disaster to tax unrealized gains because, well: they're unrealized. I'm sure the numerous serious problems with doing that will occur to anyone thinking about the question honestly for a little while. The most obvious would be the total destruction of what social mobility we do have.
> a wealthy [sic] person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%
This is insufficiently general. Anyone's gains from assets are taxed at a 15% rate for long-term gains. 60% of American families are homeowners, so it isn't correct to gloss receiving capital gains as exclusively the province of the wealthy.
As I said before, I support progressive taxation, and a higher rate for people who own (not earn) in the top 0.1%, say 20%, is something I would support.
But 15% is 4.5x of 3.35%, so in no world are the very wealthy paying a lower rate of tax than workers. It just isn't true. Therefore, if the OG poster got their wish, the 'capitalists' would pay much less tax, and the workers would pay a great deal more.
And the top 1% gets a lot of wealth that isn't classified as income.
There are people in the US who increase their wealth by $1 million each year and pay no income tax because their increase in wealth was tied to assets, not increased income that year. By loss offsetting, or other evasion/avoidance measures, they can even end up paying little or no capital gains/asset taxes (which are already significantly lower than income taxes). And they aren't included in your figure.
These are the same people mentioned in the other comment reply to you, quote "A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%, whereas a wealthy person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%. And that is if they realize the gains at all, because their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all."
If assets and capital gains were taxed in the same way (no intermingling, no loss offsetting) as income taxes, then tax would be far more equally distributed - which according to you, would be better right?
You think it's unfair to ask "laborers" pay more tax, since the top 1% already pay 45% of income tax
Let's adjust the law then and have the top 5% by wealth pay 45% of all wealth+income increase via tax, this must be fairer to you?
Basically I would agree with your argument if the practical effects were that the people in practice with the most money and secure income(from any form, be it employment or wealth/asset gain) were paying 45% of all the taxes, however that's not the case. And you are ignoring massively the unrealized gains and ability to offset losses which is available only to those with wealth, but not income. (e.g. I can't set aside my gross salary as a net loss and then use an instrument to gift it to my children a few years later with no effective tax)
The current system is designed to A) Easily extract taxes (do it before the commoners get the net money B) Keep assets with those who already own them C) Shift the tax burden on to the top 20-30% of earners by income, but not wealth.
The effective tax rates you quote for the US are both influenced by this system in a way we can't remove from the data, and show anyway that your belief is weaker than the facts you originally presented (ca. the 45% figure which ignored wealth/assets).