If the only thing keeping them in the US is the fact that they get to keep more of their wealth, it seems to me that’s a pretty good argument that they’re not paying enough in taxes.
I agree with your sentiments entirely (right down to metaphorically eating the rich), but I want to be pedantic here because it is precisely the point I was hoping to make by implication: fair does not mean equal. Fairness speaks to equity, and equity is not synonymous with equality. As it happens, I do believe that expecting higher income earners to pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes is “fair.”
I strongly suspect the author of the WSJ article, the so-called “data point,” linked to in the OP is being willfully disingenuous.
Hey now! I grew up in Greenwich! 
When they say the top 1% of income tax filers, is that limited to individuals and families filing personal income tax returns? I can’t access the article and I dint know if that’s clarified anywhere.
Without reading the article….and knowing the slant of the WSJ….I suspect not, and I would not be at all surprised if they are including corporations and what they pay in corporate taxes.
If this is the case, then 40% does seem really low.
There is also confusion and ignorance about how wealth actually gets generated and a total lack of perspective of wealth.
Bill Gate’s father was a partner in a law firm and his mom had some sort of corporate job working for the CEO of IBM apparently. So in many people’s mind Bill Gates was “born rich”. By most standards his parents probably were “rich”. They weren’t “richest man in the world” rich.
People complain "Amazon mistreats their workers and don’t pay them very well. Are we talking about working in an Amazon distribution warehouse in…wherever or working as an engineer for Amazon the FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) tech company making $300k a year…where I’m sure they are mistreated in completely different ways?
Do we “eat” the people who create billion and trillion dollar companies along with the hedge fund managers.
I suppose that depends in part on who you think it is that actually “create[s] billion and trillion dollar companies.”
As long as no one is under the illusion that a customer base is involved it’s all good.
Or look at it from the perspective of the Laffer curve (the actual Laffer curve; not the twisted mockery of it so often used by the Right): It’s true that, if taxes got to 100%, then nobody would ever do anything taxable (they’d leave for other countries, or stop working, or whatever). And it’s true, therefore, that there’s some optimal level of taxation, somewhere in between 0 and 100% that will raise the greatest level of revenue. And that’s all the original Laffer curve actually said, because it was literally just a freehand sketch on a napkin based on no data at all.
So the problem then becomes finding that optimum level. That’s a job for calculus, but to summarize, the optimum level will be the level at which the marginal gain from increasing the tax percentage exactly offsets the marginal loss from people leaving the system. Which means that, at the optimum level, there will in fact be at least some folks leaving the system.
Contrapositively, of course, this means that if (as is currently the case), nobody at all is leaving the system, then that’s absolute proof that taxes on the rich aren’t yet high enough.
So we need to increase taxes on the rich until the rich do, in fact, start leaving. And then, once we reach that level, we shouldn’t even back off to a point just before that: We should take a look at the data we would then have (which we don’t have now), to estimate how many more would leave at various levels. And then use that information to set the tax rate to the ideal value, which will almost certainly be even higher.
I’m not even sure that’s true. Or any more true than the idea that if we guarantee to each person that they will receive everything they need, regardless of their productivity, then they won’t do anything productive at all.
Those are, I think, the two great falsehoods that are holding the US back and preventing it from becoming a no less productive but far more just and equitable society.
Yes, but read those three words carefully- federal income taxes. They account for only 42% of the tax income collected. Also note- this was the Wall Street Journal- no longer such a solid source.
Right.
Social Security taxes- 24%- and the rich stop paying those on income quite early.
Sales taxes, etc- 17%- more or less taxes on the poor and middle class.
And then of course the very rich- the 1%ers, rig their taxes to pay less than their share-
Billionaires in the U.S. pay a smaller tax rate than most teachers and retail workers. Thanks to a tax code that favors income from wealth over income from work—and a slew of tax-avoidance strategies—the richest among us end up paying a smaller percentage of their income to the federal government than most working families.
And what is "fair? If we increased what the rich pay by a little more than double- could they afford that? Would they go hungry? Would their kids go unclothed? Would they be unable to get housing? No, no, and no. They could easily afford it- them the middle class and poor would have no Income tax burden- just part of the other 58% of the taxes collected.
‘The tax code should, in its majestic inequality, tax rich and poor alike on their luxury yachts, winter penthouse apartments, capital gains, and luxury car collections.’
~ Anatole France, The Undead
Doesn’t matter what the workers do, if there’s no company there because nobody invested the capital to get it going or expand it. I’d like to see all these poor people pull that trick off.
Is it illegal? I’d argue we should tighten that up, rather than be bitchy that they’re doing what everyone does with their taxes, only on a bigger scale.
Speaking on behalf of the poor people of America, we pull that off through investments by our union pension funds, retirement accounts and the like.
As I said above,
and
And yet your entire OP was on the basis of that misleading statistic.
Exactly.
Whatever
Deal with it
Just so we’re in agreement, we’re going to raise taxes on the wealthy, right?
Back to 70% marginal rate.
Then no upper limit of Social Security taxes. (with modest increases in benefits). And no taxes on Social Security or Unemployment.
I think that people would still do things; they just wouldn’t do them in a taxable way. Like, if I won the mega-lottery, I’d still keep on teaching, because I love doing it; I just wouldn’t need to collect a paycheck for it any more.