The focus on income taxes is a red herring. The poor pay a disproportionate amount in regressive taxes such as sales tax. One must look at overall burdens and overall ability to pay. Proportionately the more one has the more one should pay.
The focus on income taxes is a red herring. The poor pay a disproportionate amount in regressive taxes such as sales tax. One must look at overall burdens and overall ability to pay. Proportionately the more one has the more one should pay.
If you read the article, you'd know that capital gains are included (since cap gains are included on federal income tax returns).
The poor pay a disproportionate amount in regressive taxes such as sales tax. One must look at overall burdens and overall ability to pay.
Yes, the poor consume disproportionately, and pay a disproportionate amount of consumption taxes. All that says is the rich consume far less than they could, and are much less of a drain on society than the poor.
One must look at all tax receipts and not concentrate on income taxes. The very wealthy are not paying enough to sustain the system that they benefit from.
I did read the article. It wasn't clear if capital gains taxes were included. Capital gains are not income as far I know. I mentioned my ignorance on this point. Clearly I indicated reading the article. Nitpicking on this is also a red herring. The point remains that total tax receipts is the relevant statistic in comparison to total wealth. The top 20% of the U.S. control 93% of the financial wealth in the country. I don't think they are paying 93% of the total tax burden. Taxes are also at a 50 year low and so it's clear that the very wealthy can pay more and should.
On the other hand, yequalsx, your characterization of the poor as a "drain on society" speaks volumes of how little you understand income disparity.
There are values other than pure economic utility, but from a pure economic utility function, a poor person consuming medical services doesn't help the economy. The money paid (via taxes to doctors, equipment vendors, etc.) would be more efficiently used for another purpose -- it's the broken window fallacy.
It would be interesting to figure out where the net consumers stop and net producers begin, and maybe graph that over time and culture.
There are a lot of good reasons to favor an economy which is slightly less productive than optimum, but where a larger percentage of people are net-contributors; redistributing income or wealth from the positive outliers to invest in making more people net-contributors, vs. trying to maximize the total contribution, is probably a good social choice. But it's not the purely efficient choice.