it seems to me that rich people already pay plenty:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
only referring to income taxes here. not anything else.
Why not?
A highway between Illinois and Ohio doesn't help me. It does help say the CEO of Walmart.
When you're invested into large parts of the USA, anything the government does helps your bottom line. When you're not then majority of the services the US does doesn't help you.
I never mentioned these people.
You said "... why do people believe the rich don't pay their fair share when the top 10% pay almost 3/4 of the taxes... "
I'm suggesting talking about the top 10% is misleading because when people talk about the rich not paying their fair share, they're not talking about the master electrician in your home town that broke $180k working overtime. You conflated the rich with the top 10%, but your grouping includes a whole lot of people that most of us wouldn't consider rich.
To answer your question about why people believe the rich don't pay their fair share, you either need to look at a different figure than the top 10% (which invalidates the 3/4 of the taxes portion) or you need to say everyone (including married couples filing jointly) making $178k MAGI is rich. I don't think people at large agree with the latter, so the rest of your question is premised on the wrong set of numbers. That may answer the question you posed initially.
Why?
Because that enormously expensive army we're maintaining is protecting mostly their stuff. Setting aside the fact that, say, poor people, have no money; why should the poor pay an equivalent share to protect the wealthy person's property?
I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue for/against here. Yes, people in the top 10% of income-earners collectively pay the majority of income taxes, dollar for dollar, and yes, we've been hearing variants of what Jonathan Chait called "The Stat" for years: the highest-earning 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all income taxes.[1] As Chait points out, "'The Stat' is literally true, but it is deeply misleading." For instance, FICA is not a progressive tax; it's a flat tax that stops being collected at around at around $150K of income. Somebody making $80K pays way, way, way more FICA as a percentage of their income as somebody making $800K does.
While I'm not suggesting we need a wealth tax, start burning down mansions, etc., etc., it's at least worth considering the possibility that America has a tax system which disproportionately favors the wealthy. That multimillionaires and billionaires pay, dollar for dollar, more taxes than the shift manager of your local Jersey Mike's does is not some kind of slam-dunk argument against said possibility.
[1]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/fact-check-richest-1...
> if the link had a 0.1% bracket it would show that the even smaller group pays an even higher percentage of the total income tax revenue relative to their size.
That's exactly the point: in absolute values, if you have a lot of concentration of wealth, those will come out to be most of the tax base. That doesn't mean that proportionally they are paying the same. As a matter of fact, someone that makes 100k being taxed 20% is actually more onerous than someone that makes 1M being taxed 20%. This is why most countries try to have a progressive tax system.
I hope you're just confused about what everyone is saying, and not being intentionally disingenuous.
Especially given the things that these individuals often do with their wealth.
The cutoff for this is probably more in the top 1 to 0.1% range.
This notion is not something that only poor communists subscribe to (out of selfinterest/delusion), see e.g.
of course, this is how a progressive tax system works inevitably. thus, my point and question is, how are rich people not already paying their fair share? by all data available with respect to [income taxes], they already pay a ton, no?
That’s a key part of the argument though. Once someone reaches a certain level of wealth, should it get easier or harder to keep growing that wealth?
I say this in terms of value to society. Is having some extremely, extremely rich individuals of value to the US?
yes. restated, is it good or bad that the USA has rich people? clearly it is good. if it were bad, then there would be evidence that countries with no rich people are better, but there is no such evidence.
That's not the question. Having rich people is one thing; having extremely, extremely rich people is another. We're talking about people that are worth the entire annual economic output of entire medium-sized metropolitan areas of the US and Canada, not the guy you knew from college who became director of sales at a software vendor and lives in a neighborhood with a golf course.
I'm not sure what "fairness" means to you? A fixed amount, per capita? Would you then throw everyone not making the cut into some kind of debtors prison, or working camp?
I'd argue that income is a decent enough proxy for how much utility a person derives from tax expenditures: Just protecting that income would be pretty much exactly proportional in a full anarcho/wild-west civilisation (can see this in unstable countries, where you often have a scale between "have to regularly pay off someone" to "need a private militia" to keep your gains).
That said, why should we expect a direct relationship between increased tax burden and services received? You're not paying for services like a vendor, you're paying "society" in a sense.
That’s a key part of this discussion and argument. So once someone has the money, let’s just ignore it.
the only true way to do it is to tax upon realization, which is already what happens.
None of this is new or novel.
Depends on how you value the service of protecting that wealth. Prooperty rights enforced by the state, and the more property one has, the more one benefits from that.
> no way the top 10% receive 3/4 of the services
I think the argument is that the main service USA taxes pay for is defending property and keeping order (via force and infrastructure) such that property rights are honored. The rich have disproportionate property, so they receive disproportionate service.
all 50 states already levy property taxes on real estate so that's already accounted for separately
If you've asked this question in good faith, perhaps isolating and over-defining "income" or "property" is limiting your understanding of the broader question we're responding to: do rich people pay more or less tax compared to the value they get from government? Most here seem to be in agreement that rich get more value from our government than poor do because they have more at stake.
Because the top 10% are not rich.
Only the top ~0.5% are rich. The reality is that the vast majority of that 3/4 of taxes is paid by the middle class.
Put another way, the top 10% is mostly 6 figure salaries, not 7 figure salaries, and certainly not 8 or 9 figure salaries.
I think the real distinction is people who work for a living, and people who own for a living.
How do you measure that?
The state protecting me and my assets is of value to me. However the state protecting Musk and Musks assets is rather more important to him.
Who do you think should be paying more? The poor?
I really don't understand how borrowing against shares isn't counted as realizing the stocks. I mean, apart from rich people lobbying against it and such.
If I buy some stocks for $100 and sit on them until they're worth $1000, if I sell them for $1000 or take a $1000 loan against them, I've realized the $900 gain and I should pay taxes on that either way.
If the stock value drops below $1000 (or to $0), would you get your tax $ back?
If paid $1000 for the stock, then took a loan and paid interest on it, then paid taxes on the $900 gain, and now the stock is worth $0. Now all I get to take is a loss on the $100. Bad deal.
If you don't want to gamble then sell the stocks, that way you are not surprised by later changes.
Again, if you didn't want to accept that risk you could have just sold the stocks instead of taking a loan.
This isn't much different from taking a loan against a house, and then due to external circumstances the house drops in value, say a landfill next door. You're not getting back the property tax you paid.
I could have reasons for not wanting to sell it. Maybe I don't want to boost up my income for the year and be subject to even more taxes or loss of benefits (i.e. ACA). Or maybe I want to keep the dividend stream.
It any case it's already overcomplicated, and I don't think we need to make it moreso by giving the govt another opportunity to take yet another slice of a transaction they had nothing to do with.
Not to mention, the lender that gave me a loan has to give the govt a slice of their income, which comes from me.
> This isn't much different from taking a loan against a house
The difference is that houses rarely lose 100% of their value. Normally they hold their value or thereabouts.
do you disagree with my point, when talking only about income tax?
The richest people are not paying the “income tax” your link refers to. They often have trusts and things and do daily expenses from loans and other tricks.
Bezos and Musk, for example, paid $0 income tax https://americansfortaxfairness.org/wp-content/uploads/ProPu...
Do you think there's a reason they limited their breakdown to top 1% instead of listing the contributions from the top 0.1%? I sure do.