man does this miss the mark. most of the uber wealthy pay less than middle class. when you have money, you can afford to do things with that money that avoids paying taxes for your full value.
Incredibly wrong. You're talking about paying "as a percentage of their income/wealth"[1], whereas the GP is talking about actual dollars into the treasury.
The other response to you has the stats.
[1]and you might not even be right about that
> In all, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $864 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90 percent paid $599 billion.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
The second paragraph is the actually relevant stat, though: for all that they avoid the nominal tax rate, they still pay the majority of all taxes.
No, that's the effective tax rate for the top 1% in aggregate:
Adjusted gross income: $3,309,589,000,000
Tax paid: $863,631,000,000
What does "the most tax" mean? If you mean "most of the tax" how is that a tautology? If everyone paid $1 the top 1 percent would pay 1% of the total - which is far from "most".
Also, the language can be ambiguous in some places but it says "by Income Group" so the top 1 percent of tax payers probably refers actually to the top 1 percent of (adjusted) earners.
> GP talked about the uber wealthy.
And GGP talked about how "a minority of taxpayers finance the government".
5% is a minority paying 61% of the taxes.
25% is a minority paying 87% of the taxes.
> And GGP talked about how "a minority of taxpayers finance the government".
Your reply was to GP, and it wasn't one pointing that out.
(And actually GP would only make sense at all as a reply to GGP if he meant lower tax amount in dollars - not just a lower tax rate.)
The uber-rich aren't the top earners.
Capital holdings and labor income aren't the same thing.
Obviously, it's widely reported that the very richest of the rich pay very little tax.
But according to table C-1 of [1] the richest 20% of US households have an average income of $418,100 and, after taxes and benefits, contribute $101,300 to the treasury. The middle 20% of households have an income of $86,500 and overall contribute $200 to the treasury. And the poorest 20% of households have an income of $22,500 and receive $26,200 from the treasury.
Which makes sense when you think about it - the garbage truck visits the household on $40k just as often as it visits the household on $400k. Taxes are progressive, benefits are (mostly) equal.
So even though the richest 0.1% of people might be dodging tax entirely, the richest ~30% are the ones financing the government.
[1] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-09/60341-income.pdf