Argue for higher tax rates and more enforcement all you want, but the fact is that the current setup results in a situation where the bulk of actual taxes collected come from the rich.
This situation has persisted for as many decades as I've been able to find data for.
Here's a quote from my source: "The top 1 percent earned 22.4 percent of total AGI and paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes.
In all, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined."
And we haven't even talked about the avalanche of payroll and sales taxes generated by the businesses they run.
> Argue for higher tax rates and more enforcement all you want, but the fact is that the current setup results in a situation where the bulk of actual taxes collected come from the rich.
As they should, because the rich are paid multiples or orders of magnitude more than the middle/working class and poor. That's possible because they make money by:
- Owning capital and taking a share of the resulting productivity passively (the wealthiest of the wealthy)
- Working at a level of abstraction in the hierarchy where their skills allow them to scale their income via technology or by directing the labor of lower skilled workers.
- Working in elite supply-limited professions (i.e highly specialized doctors and lawyers, r&d in high speculation industries like AI).
It takes significant financial, social, or education capital to be able to participate in the economy in either of those modes.
As the income and wealth inequality trends have become more extreme, it makes sense that the wealthy should be paying an ever increasing portion of the tax burden, not a lower portion. Otherwise you end up with feudalism.
This situation has persisted for as many decades as I've been able to find data for.
Here's a quote from my source: "The top 1 percent earned 22.4 percent of total AGI and paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes.
In all, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined."
And we haven't even talked about the avalanche of payroll and sales taxes generated by the businesses they run.