If only we could find some way to raise taxes for people who make so much money that they wouldn't be impacted by those taxes.....
Whether that has negative effects elsewhere, I have no idea and thank goodness I'm not in charge of that.
Here's the University of Toronto's economics lesson on the subject:
That's splitting hairs. Inflation is a choice, just like taxes, and, importantly, it's a regressive tax, which helps us understand why the elites love it so much. Inflation shouldn't be mentioned without pointing out that it's a regressive tax.
> And in any case, how does that refute the idea that taxation in general is not a solution?
It doesn't. Nobody claimed that either.
Taxation by itself isn't a solution, but I doubt there is a solution that doesn't involve taxation.
> You’re arguing that because inflation (which is not a tax) is kinda sorta like a tax, therefore taxation in general isn’t a solution?
I can't find anybody claiming anything of the sort.
> That’s like saying soda taxes are bad so we shouldn’t have income taxes either.
Another strawman.
So yes it's a tax but it's a tax on a very specific segment of the population.
The top 5% of taxpayers in the USA pay 61% of the taxes.
The top 1% pay 30-40% of all the taxes and have done so for decades.
https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
You didn't even cover GP's main point about getting the top to even pay taxes; the top 1%, per your own source, only pays 26%, while the top 50% pays 16%.
Top x% tax bracket should at least be 32%, per current brackets. So one could argue they aren't even paying what they 'should'. https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...
And this isn't even considering the wealth distribution disparity, which is even greater than the income distribution disparity. A lot of that is held in the form physical assets (property) and government debt.
Financially, the wealthy own the government. In a way, a lot of the taxes they pay go back to them in the form of interest paid on government debt.
This situation has persisted for as many decades as I've been able to find data for.
Here's a quote from my source: "The top 1 percent earned 22.4 percent of total AGI and paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes.
In all, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined."
And we haven't even talked about the avalanche of payroll and sales taxes generated by the businesses they run.
As they should, because the rich are paid multiples or orders of magnitude more than the middle/working class and poor. That's possible because they make money by:
- Owning capital and taking a share of the resulting productivity passively (the wealthiest of the wealthy)
- Working at a level of abstraction in the hierarchy where their skills allow them to scale their income via technology or by directing the labor of lower skilled workers.
- Working in elite supply-limited professions (i.e highly specialized doctors and lawyers, r&d in high speculation industries like AI).
It takes significant financial, social, or education capital to be able to participate in the economy in either of those modes.
As the income and wealth inequality trends have become more extreme, it makes sense that the wealthy should be paying an ever increasing portion of the tax burden, not a lower portion. Otherwise you end up with feudalism.
Only if you ignore the payroll tax.
For the median US worker, they pay ~15% in payroll tax, and significantly less in income tax. The median US worker makes $40k year, paying like $6k in payroll tax and like $2.8k in federal income tax.
So yes, if you ignore the majority of tax that the average worker pays, then the top 5% pay the majority of tax.
It's "What percentage of their disposable income (ie, net of housing, food, health care, and other necessary expenses) do each quintile/decile/etc pay in taxes?"
And the answer is going to be that the middle and working classes pay a huge percentage—close to 100% for many—while for the wealthy it's effectively nothing.
The important thing is funding the state, not making a personal sacrifice. The economy is based on value, not pain.
But regardless, "if you try to make the rich actually participate in and contribute to society, don't be surprised if they try to destroy society instead" is exactly the kind of threat that supports the idea that we should, instead, make it impossible to be rich enough to carry that threat out.
Having a functioning and mutually beneficial society is much, much more important than letting outlandishly rich selfish people stay rich.
The top marginal tax rates during the right's supposed "golden age" after WWII were much, much higher than they are now.
That's kinda the problem. We've been running a deficit for decades because the top tax rate has been cut.
If you tax rich people even more than now, you risk simply slowing down the economy long-term and making the whole situation much worse.
We were running surpluses at numerous times across the past 100 years. Each of those surpluses ends with a reduction in the top tax rate.
If we as a society agree that some sort of progressive tax system is good (based on the fact that the mere act of survival comes with fixed costs, that naturally impact low-wealth holders over high-wealth holders) then we presumably expect higher wealth people to shoulder a larger burden of the cost of maintaining society, relative to that wealth.
The top 1% hold >30% of all wealth in the US, which, by the logic I described above, makes your 40% figure sound not just not exorbitant, but possibly too low.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...