6 ms·

Considering that the top 1% of taxpayers pay more in income taxes than the bottom 90% combined I would say the rich are already taxed.

robtherobber 9mo ago
Do you have a source for that wild assertion?
tartuffe78 9mo ago
Isn't that only because the wages of the bottom 90% have stagnated so long?
- mothballed 9mo ago
  No for the income tax, when the income tax was introduced in 1913 it was explicitly designed to apply mostly to the rich (off the cuff, I think only a few percent of people paid it for quite some time). The working poor though earn most their money through wages, which get taxed at the bare minimum 12.4% (payroll + post-payroll SS taxes), and then usually 7-10% sales tax because they are spending all they earn. So the poor are paying 20% tax right off the bat, meanwhile the rich are paying ~20% on capital gains but spending very little of that on sales tax and none on social security. So about the same overall tax rate paid on the earnings of the working poor as the rich. Social security has always been the main monkey on the back of the working class, to the point the government will literally tax a childless person back into poverty to make sure the quasi-pyramid* scheme is funded. I don't think SS payments are normally recorded in the income tax statistics. * but technically not
- simonsarris 9mo ago
  It is a lie (or decades out of date) that wages have stagnated. Wages were stagnant from ~1979 to 1997. They have increased a lot since then. Median usual weekly real earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
junkaccount 9mo ago
this is wrong logic. what if 90-99 % are paying 95% of actual taxes?
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
bachmeier 9mo ago
Now do the payroll tax.
- a4isms 9mo ago
  And the extremely regressive consumption taxes.
- gottorf 9mo ago
  The payroll tax is effectively a flat tax; you can peruse the taxes paid vs. earnings at the SSA website[0]. [0]: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/projections/tables/taxpayers.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/projections/tables/taxpayers...
  - UncleMeat 9mo ago
    It is worse than that. I pay a lower percentage of my income in payroll taxes than my wife, despite earning 8x what she earns.
    - gottorf 9mo ago
      Right, but you won't receive 8x the benefits that your payroll taxes will eventually pay for, either. In fact, your wife will probably receive a higher percentage of her FICA contributions in eventual SS benefits than you, because there's a slight element of redistribution built in; it's not a straightforward "you get back what you paid into". For me, the much more concerning part of Social Security is the demographic challenge: the program started out with over 10 workers per retiree and is down to less than three[0]. It doesn't matter how you play with the sliding scales of who pays how much and what the earnings cap is, when in the end it's two to three working people's wages being taxed to support one retiree. [0]: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
      - UncleMeat 9mo ago
        That's okay. I also won't receive as much benefits from my income taxes as my aunt who has a serious brain injury and can't take care of herself. I don't exactly need the money.
kmeisthax 9mo ago
Taking that as true, that doesn't address the actual problem. The US tax code has so many loopholes and specific rules that only ever apply to a handful of people that we might as well be talking about two different sets of laws. Even calling them "the 1%" is not particularly helpful, because 1% of America is still, like, three and a half million people. These are small business owners and the like; the kinds of people who are well off but still actually doing real productive work. Like, of course they pay the most taxes. Once you start getting into the 1% of the 1% - "the 0.01%" - then you can afford to hire an accountant who can engineer you a favorable tax situation. And so your tax share starts falling. But at the level of the 1% of the 0.01% - "the 0.0001%" - you can get custom-designed tax loopholes to favor you and you alone. Because at this level, you're talking about around 348 Americans, all with astronomically high wealth, paying almost no taxes. At this level, the amount of material wealth doesn't even matter; it's all bound up in hypotheticals and illiquid assets. Some of them might be CEOs, or interlocking directors, or politicians. But their real value is all in social capital - their connectedness to other 0.0001%ers who collectively own the economy and can move mountains in their favor.
ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago
Lets conceed that what you're saying is true (I didn't check but don't find it unebelievable). "Percentage of taxes are paid by the top %1" is just one metric, but there's no reason why we should consider it the only criterion. I would argue that in our world what you said might be true, and at the same time the bottom 90% lives their day to day with the threat that if they disobey their employer, their lives might quickly fall apart, and I would further argue that the latter is more telling about fairness in our society, than "top 1% pays more than bottom 90%"
altairprime 9mo ago
“Tax The Rich At The Same Rate Or Greater Than The Average Rate The Middle Class Are Taxed With” makes for a bad headline, no matter how much clarity it brings to the issue. It’s expected that the top 1% pay the top 99% of taxes in total dollars; that’s how a tax is supposed to work! All that’s needed is to address the unfairness in tax rate; 50% is the tax rate for $250k/year salary, so surely it’s fine to charge a billionaire the same 50% rate on their full earnings (without the ‘unsold gains’ loopholes, offshore holdings, and self-serving trusts exemptions). I’d rather Romney hadn’t been driven by spite to chime correctly at 12 straight up on the stopped clock, but +1 advocate is still better than +0.
yokaze 9mo ago
Alternative framing: If you have to earn money and pay income tax, you are not really rich.
- estearum 9mo ago
  Well let it be known that just because a framing is "alternative" does not mean it is insightful, interesting, or true.
munchler 9mo ago
They need to pay more if the US wants to avoid becoming an aristocracy. The top 1%’s share of income is growing rapidly, while the bottom 90%’s share is shrinking. https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-for-the-top-1-skyrocketed-160-since-1979-while-the-share-of-wages-for-the-bottom-90-shrunk-time-to-remake-wage-pattern-with-economic-policies-that-generate-robust-wage-growth-for-vast-majority/ https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-for-the-top-1-skyrocketed-160...
_DeadFred_ 9mo ago
aka 'People pay taxes in proportion to the money they have, not in proportion to the amount of population they make up' Do do 'percentage of total wealth paid in taxes annually' for the bottom and the top groups.
- deaux 9mo ago
  > Do do 'percentage of total wealth paid in taxes annually' for the bottom and the top groups. But that's unfair because the bottom group barely has any wealth so the numbers will be skewed! Wait a second..
bigbadfeline 9mo ago
> Considering that the top 1% of taxpayers pay more in income taxes than the bottom 90% combined I would say the rich are already taxed. There are multiple errors of omission in the above statement, I won't address all of them, but the easiest to understand (but unfortunately the least informative) is this: Individual income taxes provide only 49% of all tax revenue, so you are arguing only about a minority portion of all federal tax revenue. Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%! The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level. That omission alone makes your statement look like an attempt to deceive by hiding half of the real numbers.
- gottorf 9mo ago
  > Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%! The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway. > The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level. You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?
  - myvoiceismypass 9mo ago
    So for social security - Actually it’s not “the 1% are capped at 1% of their income” but rather capped at the same number, not percentage, as everyone else - which is around 180k per year. That was the argument being made.
  - bigbadfeline 9mo ago
    > The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs - this is a consequence of the regulatory fundamentals that have been in place for quite some time. You'd be amazed how much fiscal policy can fix, even in the current messy state of other regulations. > You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why? Not always and not at any level, it depends, the devil is in the details as usual.
toss1 9mo ago
Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted. That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough. If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not. The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0] The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1] >> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0] NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that. [0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-1s-share-of-u-s-wealth-over-time-1989-2024/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-1s-share-of-... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/income-to-be-in-top-1-percent-of-earners-in-every-us-state.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/income-to-be-in-top-1-percen...
- gottorf 9mo ago
  > Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted. > That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough. Is your reasoning that the amount of household wealth and income at each percentile should hold roughly constant over the years, as if this is some law of physics?
  - xboxnolifes 9mo ago
    Law of physics? No. The reasoning is that if the top percentile is rising instead of staying relatively constant, wealth inequality is getting worse.
tarellel 9mo ago
They are taxes, but they’re paying pennies on the dollar. While the rest of us are paying quarters for every dollar earned.
deaux 9mo ago
By golly, I do wonder why the labor class are the ones paying the taxes on their labor compared to the capital owner class! Riveting stuff.

robtherobber 9mo ago

Do you have a source for that wild assertion?

tartuffe78 9mo ago

Isn't that only because the wages of the bottom 90% have stagnated so long?

mothballed 9mo ago
No for the income tax, when the income tax was introduced in 1913 it was explicitly designed to apply mostly to the rich (off the cuff, I think only a few percent of people paid it for quite some time). The working poor though earn most their money through wages, which get taxed at the bare minimum 12.4% (payroll + post-payroll SS taxes), and then usually 7-10% sales tax because they are spending all they earn. So the poor are paying 20% tax right off the bat, meanwhile the rich are paying ~20% on capital gains but spending very little of that on sales tax and none on social security. So about the same overall tax rate paid on the earnings of the working poor as the rich. Social security has always been the main monkey on the back of the working class, to the point the government will literally tax a childless person back into poverty to make sure the quasi-pyramid* scheme is funded. I don't think SS payments are normally recorded in the income tax statistics. * but technically not
simonsarris 9mo ago
It is a lie (or decades out of date) that wages have stagnated. Wages were stagnant from ~1979 to 1997. They have increased a lot since then. Median usual weekly real earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

junkaccount 9mo ago

this is wrong logic. what if 90-99 % are paying 95% of actual taxes?

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

bachmeier 9mo ago

Now do the payroll tax.

a4isms 9mo ago
And the extremely regressive consumption taxes.
gottorf 9mo ago
The payroll tax is effectively a flat tax; you can peruse the taxes paid vs. earnings at the SSA website[0]. [0]: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/projections/tables/taxpayers.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/projections/tables/taxpayers...
- UncleMeat 9mo ago
  It is worse than that. I pay a lower percentage of my income in payroll taxes than my wife, despite earning 8x what she earns.
  - gottorf 9mo ago
    Right, but you won't receive 8x the benefits that your payroll taxes will eventually pay for, either. In fact, your wife will probably receive a higher percentage of her FICA contributions in eventual SS benefits than you, because there's a slight element of redistribution built in; it's not a straightforward "you get back what you paid into". For me, the much more concerning part of Social Security is the demographic challenge: the program started out with over 10 workers per retiree and is down to less than three[0]. It doesn't matter how you play with the sliding scales of who pays how much and what the earnings cap is, when in the end it's two to three working people's wages being taxed to support one retiree. [0]: https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
    - UncleMeat 9mo ago
      That's okay. I also won't receive as much benefits from my income taxes as my aunt who has a serious brain injury and can't take care of herself. I don't exactly need the money.

kmeisthax 9mo ago

Taking that as true, that doesn't address the actual problem. The US tax code has so many loopholes and specific rules that only ever apply to a handful of people that we might as well be talking about two different sets of laws. Even calling them "the 1%" is not particularly helpful, because 1% of America is still, like, three and a half million people. These are small business owners and the like; the kinds of people who are well off but still actually doing real productive work. Like, of course they pay the most taxes. Once you start getting into the 1% of the 1% - "the 0.01%" - then you can afford to hire an accountant who can engineer you a favorable tax situation. And so your tax share starts falling. But at the level of the 1% of the 0.01% - "the 0.0001%" - you can get custom-designed tax loopholes to favor you and you alone. Because at this level, you're talking about around 348 Americans, all with astronomically high wealth, paying almost no taxes. At this level, the amount of material wealth doesn't even matter; it's all bound up in hypotheticals and illiquid assets. Some of them might be CEOs, or interlocking directors, or politicians. But their real value is all in social capital - their connectedness to other 0.0001%ers who collectively own the economy and can move mountains in their favor.

ekjhgkejhgk 9mo ago

Lets conceed that what you're saying is true (I didn't check but don't find it unebelievable). "Percentage of taxes are paid by the top %1" is just one metric, but there's no reason why we should consider it the only criterion. I would argue that in our world what you said might be true, and at the same time the bottom 90% lives their day to day with the threat that if they disobey their employer, their lives might quickly fall apart, and I would further argue that the latter is more telling about fairness in our society, than "top 1% pays more than bottom 90%"

altairprime 9mo ago

“Tax The Rich At The Same Rate Or Greater Than The Average Rate The Middle Class Are Taxed With” makes for a bad headline, no matter how much clarity it brings to the issue. It’s expected that the top 1% pay the top 99% of taxes in total dollars; that’s how a tax is supposed to work! All that’s needed is to address the unfairness in tax rate; 50% is the tax rate for $250k/year salary, so surely it’s fine to charge a billionaire the same 50% rate on their full earnings (without the ‘unsold gains’ loopholes, offshore holdings, and self-serving trusts exemptions). I’d rather Romney hadn’t been driven by spite to chime correctly at 12 straight up on the stopped clock, but +1 advocate is still better than +0.

yokaze 9mo ago

Alternative framing: If you have to earn money and pay income tax, you are not really rich.

estearum 9mo ago
Well let it be known that just because a framing is "alternative" does not mean it is insightful, interesting, or true.

munchler 9mo ago

They need to pay more if the US wants to avoid becoming an aristocracy. The top 1%’s share of income is growing rapidly, while the bottom 90%’s share is shrinking. https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-for-the-top-1-skyrocketed-160-since-1979-while-the-share-of-wages-for-the-bottom-90-shrunk-time-to-remake-wage-pattern-with-economic-policies-that-generate-robust-wage-growth-for-vast-majority/ https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-for-the-top-1-skyrocketed-160...

_DeadFred_ 9mo ago

aka 'People pay taxes in proportion to the money they have, not in proportion to the amount of population they make up' Do do 'percentage of total wealth paid in taxes annually' for the bottom and the top groups.

deaux 9mo ago
> Do do 'percentage of total wealth paid in taxes annually' for the bottom and the top groups. But that's unfair because the bottom group barely has any wealth so the numbers will be skewed! Wait a second..

bigbadfeline 9mo ago

> Considering that the top 1% of taxpayers pay more in income taxes than the bottom 90% combined I would say the rich are already taxed. There are multiple errors of omission in the above statement, I won't address all of them, but the easiest to understand (but unfortunately the least informative) is this: Individual income taxes provide only 49% of all tax revenue, so you are arguing only about a minority portion of all federal tax revenue. Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%! The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level. That omission alone makes your statement look like an attempt to deceive by hiding half of the real numbers.

gottorf 9mo ago
> Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%! The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway. > The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level. You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?
- myvoiceismypass 9mo ago
  So for social security - Actually it’s not “the 1% are capped at 1% of their income” but rather capped at the same number, not percentage, as everyone else - which is around 180k per year. That was the argument being made.
- bigbadfeline 9mo ago
  > The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs - this is a consequence of the regulatory fundamentals that have been in place for quite some time. You'd be amazed how much fiscal policy can fix, even in the current messy state of other regulations. > You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why? Not always and not at any level, it depends, the devil is in the details as usual.

toss1 9mo ago

Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted. That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough. If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not. The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0] The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1] >> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0] NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that. [0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2025/ https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in... [1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-1s-share-of-u-s-wealth-over-time-1989-2024/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-1s-share-of-... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/income-to-be-in-top-1-percent-of-earners-in-every-us-state.html https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/income-to-be-in-top-1-percen...

gottorf 9mo ago
> Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted. > That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough. Is your reasoning that the amount of household wealth and income at each percentile should hold roughly constant over the years, as if this is some law of physics?
- xboxnolifes 9mo ago
  Law of physics? No. The reasoning is that if the top percentile is rising instead of staying relatively constant, wealth inequality is getting worse.

tarellel 9mo ago

They are taxes, but they’re paying pennies on the dollar. While the rest of us are paying quarters for every dollar earned.

deaux 9mo ago

By golly, I do wonder why the labor class are the ones paying the taxes on their labor compared to the capital owner class! Riveting stuff.