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> and the top 50% of incomes pay 97.7% of the federal taxes. The bottom 50% of incomes get 2.5% of GDP. Seems proper to me.

• hollerith 1y ago
  Gemini 2.5 Flash thinks they get 13.9%. When I asked for its source, it replied, "The Distribution of Household Income, 2019," by the Congressional Budget Office.
  • bigbadfeline 1y ago
    They get 2.5% of wealth which is a better estimate of real earnings. The data is for Q3 2024.
    • hollerith 1y ago
      I disagree that wealth is a better measure to use here. As programmers should know better than anyone, most of the wealth in the world is in the form of people and their capacity to work on teams that solve practical problems, but the wealth stats you want to use dont even try to estimate that form of wealth.
      • bigbadfeline 1y ago
        In economics terms, wealth is a measure of capacity to save, taxes come from that capacity too, so I use it as a better estimate of how much a particular demographics can contribute to taxes. I think that's fair in the context of this thread, given the present distribution realities, the bottom 50% can't contribute to tax revenue. Conversely and a bit more subtle, the top 50% ability to save doesn't seem to be impaired by their >97% contribution to revenue. > As programmers should know better than anyone, most of the wealth in the world is in the form of people and their capacity to work on teams that solve practical problems I'm looking at this as a practical matter, I'm far from moralism and moral philosophy so I can't really relate to your argument above.