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I think it's more that you will have no economic growth. The 1% already pay nearly 50% of taxes, while making around 25% of the income, and raising the corporat

I think it's more that you will have no economic growth. The 1% already pay nearly 50% of taxes, while making around 25% of the income, and raising the corporation tax lowers the income tax by a lesser amount since they often tax the same money. > We haven't really tried fixing the wealth gap since the Great Depression, so maybe it's time to give it another go. If you look at a graph of the percent of wealth held by the 1%, most of them start in 1979 to show an ever increasing trend. But if you look at a longer graph, you will see a larger U shape over the last century, with a higher peak pre-great depression than today.

JohnMakin 2y ago
> The 1% already pay nearly 50% of taxes, No, they don't. There are enough mechanisms in the tax code that many of the ultra wealthy pay nothing close to this, or anything at all. Buffet has famously complained about this.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  I think the classic example is people taking out loans against their paper wealth. No taxes paid on the loan of course, and no capital gains as nothing was realized as a gain.
- dmoy 2y ago
  It works if you ignore FICA completely (which is weird because it's like 30-40% of tax collected or something), and round 45% up to 50%. If you include FICA, it's more like the top 1% of income people pay ~30% of total tax (somewhere around there).
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    The top 1% also 'earn' >20% of all income, and hold over 30% of all wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans own less than 3% of all wealth. I really think that these figures need to start taking into account disposable income, so we can see just how fucking evil this situation really is. There's over 8 million hungry kids in the wealthiest country on the planet. Half a million families file for bankruptcy every year due to medical debt. Etc. And people are arguing in all seriousness that we need to tax corporations and the wealthy even less, quoting Thatcher and cherry-picking misleading stats. Ugh.
  - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    FICA is capped. Past about $160k, you pay no additional Social Security; past about $180k you pay no additional Medicare tax. So if you earn $1 million a year, you pay a lower percentage of your income in FICA than if you earn $100k. So if I understood you correctly, yes, the rich pay a higher percentage of taxes if you ignore FICA, because the poor and middle class pay a much higher percentage of FICA.
    - dmoy 2y ago
      Pretty much, yea. Pedantically, only the social security part of FICA is capped. Medicare you still pay 1.45-2.35%, uncapped. But the 6.2% for social security is capped, and thus for the top end of the 1% ends up being a miniscule tax. If you get rid of the social security cap, get rid of mortgage interest deduction, and add a wealth tax, that more or less solves the 2034 debt to <100% of GDP right there.
      - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        Huh. I thought that Medicare had a cap, too, just a higher one. Also note that FICA is only on "earned income" (not interest, dividends, capital gains, rental income...), and is not subject to the standard deductions.
  - naveen99 2y ago
    Also, 25% of federal expenditures are funded by printing money, which is just a tax more like fica than income tax. Of course the other way of looking at it is that fica ultimately just comes out of the pocket of the rich. If there were no payroll taxes, fica would just stay in the employers pockets. Employers are mostly the rich. Or may be it would get embezzled by the middle management due to increased principal agent problem without the payroll tax paper trail…
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  The fact that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary means nothing about his share of total tax revenue. A lot of people in the US who want Euro-style benefits don't realize that means extending our highest tax rates down to the actual middle class (which is what happens in Europe). Despite the loopholes, the lion's share of total tax revenue still comes from the top.
- baby-yoda 2y ago
  I believe the post you replied to is referring to the total share of Federal income taxes collected paid by the percentile of returns. i.e. the top 1% of tax filers by income paid nearly 50% of all taxes collected. This is accurate per the latest statistics released by the IRS, for tax year 2021; the top 1% of returns paid 45.78% of all taxes collected. https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-tax-rate-and-income-percentile https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat...
  - xscott 2y ago
    Another link with the same data in a table: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... It's funny. If you had 100 people in a room, there's one guy paying for about 45 people. And the next 4 people are paying for about 5 people each (20 total). And the lowest paid 50 people combined are paying for about 2 people total. I think we should just not have the bottom half of income earners in the US pay any taxes. It wouldn't change the numbers much, and then it would be one less thing for them to complain about. However, I don't expect anyone to put down their torches and pitch forks any time soon. It's too easy to use this to get people spun up, even above average educated people as in this forum.
    - mandmandam 2y ago
      Those 50 under-paid and exploited people own just ~3% of all the wealth in the room, even though they're doing about 30% of the work. Where does the vast, vast majority of the value of their work go? It goes to the asset class - the top 1 or 2 people. And you call the top guy generous because he pays ~40% tax on the money the bottom 90% made for him. Even as he buys politicians, runs monopolies, subsidizes fossil fuel, and strip mines the planet for even more. Don't make out like the 50% of people making 2 or 3% of income are just ungrateful, or bad at math. The insane level of inequality in America is literally an existential threat to humanity.
    - pclmulqdq 2y ago
      That data is not adjusted for wealth transfers and other social programs. If you do make the adjustment, you will find that a majority of Americans are not net taxpayers at all. That number may be as high as 60%. The data on this is obfuscated by having 10000 different programs partly so you can't see what the real distribution of federal revenue is like.

JohnMakin 2y ago

> The 1% already pay nearly 50% of taxes, No, they don't. There are enough mechanisms in the tax code that many of the ultra wealthy pay nothing close to this, or anything at all. Buffet has famously complained about this.

dgfitz 2y ago
I think the classic example is people taking out loans against their paper wealth. No taxes paid on the loan of course, and no capital gains as nothing was realized as a gain.
dmoy 2y ago
It works if you ignore FICA completely (which is weird because it's like 30-40% of tax collected or something), and round 45% up to 50%. If you include FICA, it's more like the top 1% of income people pay ~30% of total tax (somewhere around there).
- mandmandam 2y ago
  The top 1% also 'earn' >20% of all income, and hold over 30% of all wealth. The bottom 50% of Americans own less than 3% of all wealth. I really think that these figures need to start taking into account disposable income, so we can see just how fucking evil this situation really is. There's over 8 million hungry kids in the wealthiest country on the planet. Half a million families file for bankruptcy every year due to medical debt. Etc. And people are arguing in all seriousness that we need to tax corporations and the wealthy even less, quoting Thatcher and cherry-picking misleading stats. Ugh.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  FICA is capped. Past about $160k, you pay no additional Social Security; past about $180k you pay no additional Medicare tax. So if you earn $1 million a year, you pay a lower percentage of your income in FICA than if you earn $100k. So if I understood you correctly, yes, the rich pay a higher percentage of taxes if you ignore FICA, because the poor and middle class pay a much higher percentage of FICA.
  - dmoy 2y ago
    Pretty much, yea. Pedantically, only the social security part of FICA is capped. Medicare you still pay 1.45-2.35%, uncapped. But the 6.2% for social security is capped, and thus for the top end of the 1% ends up being a miniscule tax. If you get rid of the social security cap, get rid of mortgage interest deduction, and add a wealth tax, that more or less solves the 2034 debt to <100% of GDP right there.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      Huh. I thought that Medicare had a cap, too, just a higher one. Also note that FICA is only on "earned income" (not interest, dividends, capital gains, rental income...), and is not subject to the standard deductions.
- naveen99 2y ago
  Also, 25% of federal expenditures are funded by printing money, which is just a tax more like fica than income tax. Of course the other way of looking at it is that fica ultimately just comes out of the pocket of the rich. If there were no payroll taxes, fica would just stay in the employers pockets. Employers are mostly the rich. Or may be it would get embezzled by the middle management due to increased principal agent problem without the payroll tax paper trail…
pclmulqdq 2y ago
The fact that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary means nothing about his share of total tax revenue. A lot of people in the US who want Euro-style benefits don't realize that means extending our highest tax rates down to the actual middle class (which is what happens in Europe). Despite the loopholes, the lion's share of total tax revenue still comes from the top.
baby-yoda 2y ago
I believe the post you replied to is referring to the total share of Federal income taxes collected paid by the percentile of returns. i.e. the top 1% of tax filers by income paid nearly 50% of all taxes collected. This is accurate per the latest statistics released by the IRS, for tax year 2021; the top 1% of returns paid 45.78% of all taxes collected. https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-statistical-tables-by-tax-rate-and-income-percentile https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat...
- xscott 2y ago
  Another link with the same data in a table: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... It's funny. If you had 100 people in a room, there's one guy paying for about 45 people. And the next 4 people are paying for about 5 people each (20 total). And the lowest paid 50 people combined are paying for about 2 people total. I think we should just not have the bottom half of income earners in the US pay any taxes. It wouldn't change the numbers much, and then it would be one less thing for them to complain about. However, I don't expect anyone to put down their torches and pitch forks any time soon. It's too easy to use this to get people spun up, even above average educated people as in this forum.
  - mandmandam 2y ago
    Those 50 under-paid and exploited people own just ~3% of all the wealth in the room, even though they're doing about 30% of the work. Where does the vast, vast majority of the value of their work go? It goes to the asset class - the top 1 or 2 people. And you call the top guy generous because he pays ~40% tax on the money the bottom 90% made for him. Even as he buys politicians, runs monopolies, subsidizes fossil fuel, and strip mines the planet for even more. Don't make out like the 50% of people making 2 or 3% of income are just ungrateful, or bad at math. The insane level of inequality in America is literally an existential threat to humanity.
  - pclmulqdq 2y ago
    That data is not adjusted for wealth transfers and other social programs. If you do make the adjustment, you will find that a majority of Americans are not net taxpayers at all. That number may be as high as 60%. The data on this is obfuscated by having 10000 different programs partly so you can't see what the real distribution of federal revenue is like.