If you don’t see any problem, that’s fine. I’m merely providing some data. And it’s just a tiny slice of the entire picture, the entire story.
The author wants to use a colloquial meaning of “fair share” to point out the fact that “make the rich pay their fair share” is a politically masked platitude.
“Fair share” implies some sort of equality or equity. And the author is correct – I have no interest in the rich paying what’s colloquially “fair.”
But “the rich need to pay for the vast majority of public services because those services are necessary for the functioning of a modern society. Because that spending is necessary, the money must come from the members of society who have money” doesn’t roll off the tongue, and it’s too on-the-nose for people who want to avoid directly invoking class warfare.
I, for one, agree with the OP and the author. I think we need to drop the pretense. We need more class warfare. Eat the rich.
Pardon me but do you have any Grey Poupon?
Another issue is the type of income and if it can be offset by losses. My spouse and I are both professionals with advanced degrees and make good salaries. But it is all W2 income. There are very few deductions we can make on our tax returns, so each additional $1 we make gets taxed at almost 50% after you include federal, state, local and NIIT taxes. Whereas a successful business owner might realize a similar amount of gross revenue, but would be able to offset much of that with business reductions and be taxed at a much lower effective rate. As mentioned by others above, the super rich who’s income is mostly investment gains typically pay even a lower tax rate. It’s jarring when a billionaires effective tax rates are similar to those with a $50k/year income.
It depends on which “rich” are being discussed. There’s those that are rich due to their own work, mostly the famous entertainers (musicians, athletes, actors, writers, etc.) but also a few of the highly educated technical professionals such as doctors and engineers. Then there’s those who are rich because they own the means of production but whose only real contribution is to sign the checks for those workers under them who do the actual producing. It seems to me when we say that the tax burden falls on the rich, we’re talking about people who make their money due to their hard work and talent. People like Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Lebron James, Stephen King, etc. We should instead by talking about people like Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. That’s where the real wealth is, and those are the people who aren’t paying their fair share.
Hmm. Do take this:
Into consideration. Capital has already largely fled the progressive Western world, that’s why there are so many factories in Vietnam. The very rich can flee, too, if they decide that will make them better off.
The “data” is just the natural result of progressive income taxes. It’s not a surprise that high earners pay a disproportionate share because that’s the intent of our tax code.
What’s the hot take here?
Exactly. The ones paying all those taxes are, I suspect, people who have very high incomes due to their own work, mostly the famous entertainers, but probably a few others with highly specialized skills that are in high demand. As you say, the ones we should be going after are the ones who are truly wealthy, not those who get paid a large amount due to their highly specialized and highly in demand skills.
Just one very misleading data point.
This graph is from 2014, so it’s worse now. But this is from a poll asking Americans what they think the actual distribution of wealth in the US is, and what they think the ideal is.
So I know wealth is not income, but as others have pointed out, federal income tax is the most progressive tax so it’s misleading to use it as a proxy for overall tax burden. But even so, the rich are paying all the taxes because they have all the money.
If, hypothetically, they made 99% of the income, and they paid 90% of the taxes, you’d have people saying “they pay 90% of the taxes! they’re overtaxed! how is that not their fair share!” but in this scenario, they would be paying less than their fair share. And this ignores such factor as the diminishing value of money, disproportionate benefits from society, etc.
I do think it is indeed very important to differentiate people who make a high income because they do useful high skill work like doctors, engineers, etc. and people who make a lot of money because they have a lot of money or own a lot of things. Taxes should be directed at the latter where possible. They’re not contributing to society anywhere near how much money they take out of it, whereas high paid high skill jobs are much closer. This gets into the difficulty in assessing income versus wealth though.
But anything that tries to paint the rich in the US as some sort of victims is just inherently ridiculous. They’re running roughshod over the rest of us. We could be working 25 hour weeks and still be fabulously rich as a country if the productivity gains that technology and infrastructure was spread around society rather than concentrated in a few dozen people.
Of course. When your net worth increases because you give up your time, and the sweat of your brow, to earn money, that’s income that must be taxed. When your investments increase through the sweat of someone else’s brow, that’s yours to keep, relatively speaking.
I’ve come to find that argument to be vaguely offensive. It seems we ask certain people to sacrifice for their country; we send members of the military to foreign countries to get shot at, and we thank them for their service. Some literally give their lives for their country. But we dare not ask rich people to give up some of their wealth for their country, lest they move somewhere else that gives them a better deal.
Which is not to say that the argument isn’t true, just offensive.
According to Forbes, eight of the top ten richest people in the world still live in the US, and the other two are in France and Spain, both first-world countries. Extend it to the top 20, and it’s eight more in the US, plus one each in India and Mexico at 18th and 19th place. Past that, there’s more diversity, but it’s still mostly the US and other first-world countries, plus a few India and China (42 out of the top 100 Americans). They’re not fleeing.
Our taxes are currently totally manageable for the very rich. But if we really tried to eat the rich, that could change quickly. 
I’m not arguing against taxing the rich more. I think i ought to pay more taxes, and i certainly think those even wealthier than i ought to.
But i am arguing that you want to consider the social and financial environment, and not try to make the rich miserable.
Piper sighs and tucks his noose away.
Well, they won’t be miserable, at least. Dead, yes, but not miserable.
I hope they’re not miserable, or dead. I just want them to not be rich anymore. “Rich” isn’t some inherent trait, it’s a condition that society allows to happen and has the right to solve through confiscation.
I think we absolutely should be mindful of the rich leaving the country and taking their wealth with them. But if they want to cede their assets and leave, let them.
Should we go back to the past: say 70 years ago when the conservative Republican Eisenhower was President in 1954 (two years after he was first elected in 1952)?
The top tax bracket was 91% for income over $400,000.
Agree w @PastTense’s point. But to be honest we need to factor in inflation.
Ref the official US government CPI calculator at CPI Inflation Calculator, $400K then is equivalent to $4.7M today.
So a tax that hits fatcats and entertainers hard (assuming it covers the kind of income they have), but doesn’t decimate the doctors, lawyers, and upper-middle managers.
As always, the devil is in the details of what is and isn’t taxable or deductible and what avenues there are to move assets and incomes legitimately (or illegitimately) out of reach.
I want to go back to the OP’s second sentence. Politicians like to scream, “Make the rich pay their fair share!”
Other than, say Bernie Sanders, who are these politicians? Where are they? How quietly do they screams The well has been good and thoroughly poisoned right from the start to create a razzle-dazzle of sleight of hand that conceals all reality.
The reality that I live in comprises tax cuts, tax loopholes, tax evasion, techniques to apply losses and deductibles to make tax burdens lower or zero them out ( nearly 50 companies in the S&P 500, including Tesla (TSLA), 3M (MMM) and Airbnb (ABNB), reported paying no income tax expense in 2023, says an Investor’s Business Daily analysis of data), the employer’s cap on matching Social Security tax, outright bribes (i.e. tax abatements) to bring industry into community, tariffs (deductible as business expenses), and the coordinated hate campaign against the IRS.
The mostly imaginary evil of the IRS is a prominent tool invented by the right to cut its power. After the agency had lost 50,000 employees in five years, Biden in 2022 signed a bill to hire new staff to make up for those and further losses, collect billions of dollars in already legally owed money, modernize its technology, cut down on wait times, and spare everybody under $400,000 (the 99%). Immediately after taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans voted to kill the bill. Make the rich pay their fair share, horsepucky.
To recap.
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Wealth is not the same as income. The wealthy are thousands of times more wealthy than the median American; their income is at most hundreds of times more. Wealth is not taxed unless it is converted into liquid assets, and those are commonly taxed as capital gains, a much lower rate for everybody in that $400,000+ world. Some money can be clawed back at death, but politicians have been trying to wholly eliminate the estate tax even though filing threshold for 2025 will be $13,990,000. Fair share, baby.
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Capital is not the same as manufacturing. Factories have gone to other countries with cheaper labor. Nevertheless, the proceeds come back to America and provide the capital for future displays of wealth. In addition, tech firms are sinking hundreds of billions into new forms of tech, like AI, that do not require factories. All writable off as business expenses.
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Income tax is not the only kind of tax. Sales tax is the most regressive tax and demands about $700 billion a year state and local, or about a third of US individual income tax. Five states don’t have state sales taxes, but make up the income in a variety of ways: property taxes, car taxes, gas taxes, service fees and an endless variety more. That half the country does not pay federal income taxes is a deceptive statistic.
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Tax policy has been systematically rigged against the not wealthy since long before I was born.
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The rich have never paid their fair shares.
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Nobody with power is calling for them to do so. Just the opposite. The party now in power is screaming for tax cuts even though every economist had noted that the previous round was hurtful to the non-rich.
If their money is more important to them than their country, we’re better off without them. Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out. Someone just as smart and ambitious will step up to take their place.
On the other hand, if we raise taxes on the rich I wouldn’t mind giving them some of the same perks we give to servicemen and -women. I’ll thank them in public, and let them board airplanes before me. That sounds fair, don’t you think?