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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Our budget deficit is $2 trillion. To close it, you need to significantly raise taxes on the fattest part of the income curve, which is the top 25%. They have $10 trillion of income. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in.... An across the board 200 basis point increase would close the deficit. That would raise their taxes to 38% at the low end to 46% at the high end, which is perfectly fine.

The problem is that the top 25% isn’t an “out group” in either coalition. You have Facebook PMs who vote blue and guys who own a small plumbing company who vote red both making $1 million+ annually and neither wanting their own taxes to go up. Then there are the guys below them looking up. Over 10% of the country will be in the top 1% of earners at some point in their life. So the guys pulling in a few hundred K as a senior engineer or construction manager don’t want their taxes to go up either.

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> taking half of someone’s money is totally fine

Okay. Then let’s also reduce what’s spent welfare/benefits by a similar amount, at least we’re not taking money they worked for.

No, U.S. benefits are at a typical level for an OECD country. The problem is the taxes. U.S. taxation is only 25% of GDP, versus 40% in western Europe. We could raise taxes $3 trillion annually and still be at the level of one of the more responsible European countries like the U.K.

The wealthy have been taxed appropriately in the past, we just need to do it again. There is precedent.

The Peak Year (1944): The 94% rate applied to taxable income over $200,000 (which included a 3% regular tax and a 91% surtax). That $200,000 would be incomes over $3.8 Million today.

The High-Tax Era: Top marginal rates remained above 90% for two decades, spanning from 1944 through 1963.

This is supposedly the era that made America "great".

Okay, but how much tax revenue was raised from those high marginal rates? The top rate is meaningless without knowing how much money that actually brings in for the government. That’s the key part of the analysis for purposes of this discussion.

Aside from a brief blip during WWII, federal tax receipts as a percentage of GDP have been stable at around 17% of GDP, going back to 1950: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S. Those high marginal rates never actually raised very much revenue. To close the deficit, we have to get that 17% number up to 23%.

To raise revenue, you need to lower the threshold at which high marginal rates kick in so that you actually capture the fat part of the tax base. About half of all income is earned by people making $100k-800k. That’s around where the heavy tax burden falls in every western european country.

> Over 10% of the country will be in the top 1% of earners at some point in their life

Though most of them only for one year due to temporary revenue, so it's not that rational.

At peak career ages, the 75th percentile household income is almost $200k and the 90th percentile is almost $300k. That’s exactly the range you need to tax. Across all ages, households earning between $150k and $800k earn half of all income—$7 trillion.

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