Not All Money Is Created Equal - taxes of the poor, middle, and rich

"<i>If the top 1% of income earners make 27% of all the money, it would be perfectly reasonable for them to pay 27% of all the taxes.</i>"<p>Actually, no. What are they getting in return for that?<p>Past a certain amount, it doesn't in aggregate cost any more for the government to support the needs of any one person. When you tax people beyond that point, you're explicitly engaging in redistribution and that is a debatable point, not something that is "perfectly reasonable".<p>To take a real world example, a foreigner can go to a canton in Switzerland and do a private tax treaty with it, where he e.g. pays a fixed amount of tax each year. The cantons that do this are stating that it doesn't cost them any more than that sum to cover his costs to them.

when have "taxes" become a dirty word. Hell we had 90% taxes in the 50s and supposedly that was the most glorious time in United States history.<p>In fact if you compare the tax rate for the top earners with the overall American economy, you can see that the lower the taxes for the top brackets, the crappier the economy tends to be. And sure correlation does not mean causation but still.<p>Honestly I don't think most people would mind getting taxed at a higher rate, as long as the money actually went somewhere positive. To lower the national debt, to fix this country's infrastructure, to do the whole single payer health care(not the abortion that they are currently trying to implement). The shittier the economy, the more necessary it is to have a social net that'll help people get back on their feet.<p>I mean, seriously, the country is 11 trillion in debt, and because of this taxes = political suicide meme, that number just keeps getting bigger and bigger.<p>And I'm not proposing raising taxes on everyone...but if you make more than 1 million a year, anything above that can be taxed at 60-70%(with the exception of funding startups...which gets you a tax write off)<p>Edit: if you are going to downvote, at least have the balls to make a reply.

A deceptive and disingenuous presentation of tax burden on Americans.<p>Doesn't take into account state and local taxes (sales taxes, auto registration, etc.) that are regressive in nature.<p>Also, it can be argued that those well endowed should incur greater tax fees — after all, it is they that have more stuff to protect and defend. What about costs that all pay (subsidies for stadiums, roads, public works, etc.) that overwhelmingly benefit the affluent.

Important to consider here is the earned income and child tax credits. While it's a slippery slope to start subtracting "benefits" in some fashion, these seem appropriate as they are a direct cash transfer. With that in mind, the highest 60% of wage earners pay <i>more than 100%</i> of the tax burden of the federal government.

Some obvious and high-impact taxes that this chart misses:<p>- Property taxes - Sales tax - Tax-free executive perks<p>And of course, the discussion about fairness isn't taking into account the large percentage of industries that trade in or are based on commercialization of natural resources, nor a whole lot of other things like the large amount of current wealth, as well as industrial and military power still held that was originally bootstrapped or massively grown by colonization, slavery, and wars of aggression.<p>Fairness discussions like these are worse than useless, they purport and perhaps even intend to be amoral, but fall quite short and instead mislead.<p>[Edit:] Actually it isn't that they purport to be amoral, they can't be. Fairness is intrinsically moral, and thus if you're gonna talk about it you have to try a lot harder to bring in the real meat of the fairness discussion, like for instance, where is all that wealth coming from. People are quite worried about the lazy dude playing video games but getting a free ride from "socialism" (an abused word if there ever was one), reminds me of the mote and the beam.

The thing is, of course, that most of the income of the wealthy is <i>never</i> taxes. How much income tax has Bill Gates ever paid? I'd be surprised if it's anywhere near 10% of his wealth.