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This is such a weird, backwards way of framing the situation. People in that income/wealth group fund essentially the entire government budget while also costi

This is such a weird, backwards way of framing the situation. People in that income/wealth group fund essentially the entire government budget while also costing essentially nothing, so of course there is an incentive to retain them, but generally governments are trying to just stop one cent short of bleeding them so dry that they move away. In 2018: "The top 1 percent paid a greater share of the federal tax revenue (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent)." Put another way - your local school would be in trouble if all you had were families on $40k sending 3 kids to public school, it's being funded by the family on $300k and sending their kid to a separate private school.

g_sch 7y ago
> In 2018: "The top 1 percent paid a greater share of the federal tax revenue (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent)." Put another way - your local school would be in trouble if all you had were families on $40k sending 3 kids to public school, it's being funded by the family on $300k and sending their kid to a separate private school. This kind of statistic would benefit from being balanced against the share of income and/or wealth held by the top 1%. Taking wealth, for example: the top 1% owns 35% of the wealth in the USA as of 2014. [0] This proportion has been increasing over time, so even if governments were attempting to "bleed[] them dry" (I don't believe they are), they're not doing so very effectively. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
true_religion 7y ago
My local school would have problems if that were the case, but median income is over 100,000 in my district. All local schools basically get money from their surrounding households, and high income families live in entirety different zipcodes from low income ones.

g_sch 7y ago

> In 2018: "The top 1 percent paid a greater share of the federal tax revenue (37.3 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (30.5 percent)." Put another way - your local school would be in trouble if all you had were families on $40k sending 3 kids to public school, it's being funded by the family on $300k and sending their kid to a separate private school. This kind of statistic would benefit from being balanced against the share of income and/or wealth held by the top 1%. Taking wealth, for example: the top 1% owns 35% of the wealth in the USA as of 2014. [0] This proportion has been increasing over time, so even if governments were attempting to "bleed[] them dry" (I don't believe they are), they're not doing so very effectively. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

true_religion 7y ago

My local school would have problems if that were the case, but median income is over 100,000 in my district. All local schools basically get money from their surrounding households, and high income families live in entirety different zipcodes from low income ones.