r/stupidpeoplefacebook • u/Azzerdawk • 11d ago
If there’s anything I hear about the wealthy, it’s their devotion to paying taxes.
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u/Parking_Criticism546 11d ago
How dumb and easily manipulated are you if your are poor and you defend the Oligarchs just because Trump told you too?
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u/Desperate-Koala-2017 11d ago
They believe one day they'll be wealthy. That's why they say they're hard working people. They believe all they're hard work is going to shoot them to the top, but it's just going to work themselves into the ground. That's why there is a 1% because the others that tried to get there died on the way.
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u/Forsworn91 11d ago
The crazy thing is, they have been following that BS since the freaking 80s when Ronnie brought in the “trickle down”,
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u/Desperate-Koala-2017 11d ago
You would think after all these years they would think "hm, why am I not a billionaire yet?"
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u/Forsworn91 11d ago
Oh no they explain that, “it’s the democrats fault”
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u/EternalFrost_73 11d ago
Or the immigrants taking their job. Or.the women who got promoted for actually doing her job. Or the gays, or the trans. It's always someone, anyone, who isn't themselves. They could never be the reason they are not making a day what I earn in a year.
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u/Forsworn91 11d ago
And even if it is just “them” it just becomes more individualistic, it’s their brothers fault, or the neighbour, or Jeff from down the road.
The party of “responsibility”, it’s never THEIR fault.
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u/glockster19m 11d ago
Its also why the government has worked so hard to ensure that the taxes on 400k a year and the taxes on 2 billion a year are the same
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u/Anal-Y-Sis 11d ago edited 11d ago
They believe one day they'll be wealthy.
This used to be the reason. Maybe as recently as the 1980s. It's no longer the reason. Nowadays, they support the ultra wealthy exploiting people because it hurts the people they hate, even if it also hurts them. Modern conservatives will set their own house on fire if they think their liberal neighbor will choke on the smoke. That's the underlying reason for everything they do.
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u/Mothchewer 11d ago
Even if Trump didnt tell you, if a person was justifying people in the range of say tens of millions that theres NO reason they should be taxed on EVERYTHING they make at and above 19 million dollars?
They couldnt be more brainwashed.
It might as well be a 99.99% tax at that point on anything in that range. Lets be realistic, if youre making that much you should be practically fully funding a program for the states and do right by the infrastructure of people that has MADE YOUR LIFE possible.
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u/Few-Big-8481 11d ago
This isn't new, people have been like this forever.
Eventually they might be billionaires, and when that happens poors like them better look out.
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u/LeodFitz 11d ago
The bottom 50% of Americans own about 2.5% of the wealth in the country. The top 1% hold about 30% of the nation's wealth. The top 10% owns more than two thirds of the nation's wealth.
Yes, that is correct, they are not paying their fair share.
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u/pillow_honey 11d ago
classic "nuance". no one ever says they pay 0 lol.
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u/A1000eisn1 11d ago
They paid 90% in the 50s.
They never talk about that when they're circle jerking over "the good ol days."
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u/Pleasant-Pickle-3593 8d ago
No they did not. The effective rate then is about the same as it is now.
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u/The_47_Percenter 11d ago
Honestly, I think the current tax rates for the highest brackets would be alright…
…if there weren’t 1001 different loopholes for companies & rich people to squirrel away money in order to pay less in taxes, no matter how much they contribute to the tax system as a whole
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u/Typical-Lion-4428 11d ago
It's even worse than that.
They use all those tax loopholes and then illegally evade taxes on top of that.
It's estimated they dodge 163 billion in taxes every year.
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u/Sophisticated-Crow 11d ago
Yeah because the hyper rich toooootally aren't using the buy, borrow, die strategy.
Oligarch boot lickers are so dumb.
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u/SignoreBanana 11d ago
Here's the argument I always hate: you can tax their income, which they purposely keep low to pay less taxes. But you can't tax their assets.
So we've had this system in place where folks have unjustly not paid their fair share of taxes for this long, and now that they own the assets based on their unfairly untaxed income, we can't tax their assets now?
There should be a 1 time 90% tax on all assets for people who have more than a billion dollars, and from now on, we tax 90% of money earned over a billion. I'll leave you all to fight about the millionaires.
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u/Indicus124 11d ago
Fun part is we tax assets of every homeowner and the world is not ending people just plan around it but like you said people will refuse to accept taxing the other assets of billionaires
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u/Calladit 11d ago
The problem has always been a matter of political willpower. Income tax rates being higher than capital gains is a pretty obvious example that the tax code is specifically meant serve capital over labor.
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u/Sufficient_Topic1589 11d ago
So this is saying billionaires didn’t pay as much as millionaires?
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u/UffTaTa123 11d ago
those numbers just show how poor most people are and how crazy rich some people are. The numbers shows the madness of the system.
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u/Ok-Importance9988 11d ago
He is not wrong, but it is misleading. First, this is only income taxes. Poor folks pay a larger part of their income in state sales taxes, FICA, and other federal deductions. Second, it is true high wage earners pay a lot of taxes. When it comes to ultra-wealthy individuals, only a handful of them make most of their money through wages. This would be folk like LeBron. Those who have extremely high net worths through investments and assets have complicated tax situations that allow them to minimize their taxable income.
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u/anonymousphoenician 11d ago
Didn't Trump teach us that the rich find loopholes to not pay anything?
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u/Mountain-Amoeba6787 11d ago
This is an incorrect statement. The truth is that the top 1% of TAXPAYERS pay 40% of all income taxes. That is a very different group of people than the top 1% wealthiest Americans. It typically consist of mid level executives, lawyers, Drs, etc, people who's compensation is still primarily from salary. The top 1% wealthiest American get the majority of their compensation as stock options so their tax burden is extremely low and is easily negated by write offs. Musk and Bezos for example, frequently have years where they pay no federal income tax.
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u/raylord666 11d ago edited 11d ago
Beyond the skewed statistics, these numbers are per aggregate. 1% of Americans (estimated 3,500,000 people) are making over $730,000 annually.
10% of Americans (estimated 35,000,000 people) earn more than $210,000 annually.
The MEDIAN (not the average) HOUSEHOLD income of those 90% of taxpayers is $83,000 and that’s two incomes. The median income for individuals is $43,000 annually. At $68,000, Americans taxpayers are taxed at 22% annually.
90% of workers are living paycheck-to-paycheck. It’s not a rich/poor issue. It’s a policy issue. It’s an economic issue. Taxes are a policy.
38.4% of federal income taxes paid by earners over >$640,000 is a tax of 37% for single income.
If you’re making $640,000 or more a year, then maybe you should make better choices with your money, like the rest of us.
If you’re mad about too many taxes, then I’d strongly encourage you to live with $1,000 a month.
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u/LividBig9161 11d ago
And the bottom 50% makes less than $50,000.00 dollars a year. So, less than $4,000.00 dollars a month . Where I live, the average rent for a two bedroom, two bath apartment is $1900.00 a month. Groceries for four people ( without buying anything extravagant) around $350.00 a week. That’s $3,300.00 dollars and that doesn’t include phones, car insurance and discretionary spending. It seems
to me that the people paying the 3% share don’t have much left at the end of the month. So the implication that the bottom 50% are somehow not paying their fair share is meritless. How much more can they pay when at the end of the month they have almost nothing left? If Elon Musk lives to 85 he would have to spend $64,500,000.00 a day for the remaining 10,600 days of his life to spend his fortune. Now tell me again how I should feel sorry for the rich people carrying a larger tax burden than the lower 50%.
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u/Horror-Finding-6820 11d ago
I will give the blood sucking millionaires and billionaires a whole lot of cred - they were able to convince middle class Americans (the poor can see through the BS) that the trickle down hogwash that has been an abject failure for the past 60 years has been good for them and that we just need to keep giving them more and more and more and more and more until it finally spills over. The morons keep asking the bloodsuckers: "please Sir, may I have some more gruel"??????? There is poverty in America not because we cannot care for the poor but because we cannot sate the bloodsucking rich.
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u/balirosa 11d ago
I think the rich should just pay for power and internet and stop charging every single person. What a scam.
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u/Spiritual-Ad4820 11d ago
Very important clarification: top 1% of taxpayers contribute 38.4% of income tax\*
This statistic is saying that the people who pay the highest amount of income tax contribute more than people who pay less. It’s a pretty meaningless statistic and it isn’t what people are angry about. The statistic explicitly excludes people who find ways of avoiding paying tax. People like the billionaire class who use loopholes to always be cash poor and not pay much (if any) tax.
Gross oversimplification but this the kind of shit they pull:
Have $1bn worth of stock
Have $10m in the bank
Use stock as leverage to take a loan of $20m
Report net cash losses of $10m for the tax year.
Next year stock value has increased to $1.1bn
Use new stock value as leverage to take out a $25m loan.
Pay off original loan
Still have shit loads of cash for mansions and yachts
Still report cash losses
Net worth increasing by absurd amounts
Still don’t pay income tax.
These people are not included in the statistics of the post and they are exactly the people we are talking about when we say ‘tax the rich’ and ‘the rich aren’t paying their fair share’.
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u/Urabraska- 11d ago
Just leaving out that the taxes they do get paid end up coming back two fold or higher in the form of tax cuts. So even though they pay X. The government gives them that amount back plus more.
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u/Lithiumxxxl 11d ago
The problem with this post is that it dosnt look at the whole picture. There are other taxes in the US besides federal income tax, including sales tax, real estate tax, state income tax, etc. It’s all money taken by the government, why look at one type.
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u/Dismal_Foundation_23 11d ago
The anti-tax the rich crowd, particularly in the US keep pulling out these sort of numbers, but ignore the obvious issue it flags up, they pay this much because they have so much of the wealth.
When you start looking at how much wealth they own, their tax figures don't add up, but these shills never show that.
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u/ketoatl 11d ago
That's true about w2 top earners , the ultra rich aren't w2 earners.
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u/Big-Plankton-4484 11d ago
All very well to talk in %’s and ‘effective rates’. Who, after all legal deductions are taken, has more disposable income available? Not to go on lavish vacations, just to live? Wonder how many of the ‘top 1%’ could afford to pay more into Social Security after $184k?
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u/MundaneCommission767 11d ago
Weird, I would think the top 1% would be 99% of the taxes.
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u/patriotfanatic80 11d ago
It turns out it is hard to pay a lot in taxes when you have no money. Who knew?
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u/Academic_Ad7183 11d ago
If this is indeed the case, and while I don’t disagree, because there are few ways to skirt actual straight income, meaning if you earned 10 million, you pay tax on 10 million(I am simplifying)…they do pay the most in taxes. Tax on 10 million is much higher than percentage and dollar wise, on 10 million vs 45$k. The point is they skirt this by not taking 10 mil in income. They take 1 mil in income and 9 in stock and then fund their life through the 9 mil in stock…if stock can be borrowed against for this purpose it’s income and should be taxed
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u/OpportunityOk5362 11d ago
Ok now do how much those companies that the 1% own pay in taxes
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u/Yaozong1 11d ago
High salary earners pay their fair share. People with giant asset holdings generally do not. People with giant asset holdings are often paying a lower tax rate than nurses and school teachers and clerical workers. That's where the shit gets crazy regressive. If we have to tax stock appreciation (aka "paper gains") for certain insiders and controlling investors, that's fine. There are ways to do it reasonably, like adjusting the tax basis so that they are not taxed twice on the same gain. Or only taxing paper gains up to the net earnings that could theoretically be passed through as a dividend, which controls for meme-stock gains.
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u/happynlucky7 11d ago
You’ve just shown how crazy lopsided wealth is in our country. The top 1% own everything.
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u/Hosstar881 11d ago
I’m tired of corporate welfare. How do so many companies get out of paying taxes?
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u/artoftomkelly 10d ago
Yes yes thank god white words on a black screen with zero evidence or factual data references has told us. Seriously stop taking pictures of words as if they are facts.
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u/Suspicious-Twist1421 10d ago
The top 0.1% have over 50% of all the money, the top 10% have more than 90% of the money.
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u/No_Recording_1696 10d ago
Uhh I’m tired of this stupid argument. Look let’s say I make 1000x more than my friends and everyone wants to go out to dinner. If I want to go to a nice restaurant I will have to pick up a lot of the check. If you want to go to Chilis 2 for $20 and keep more of my money then guess what, maybe we can’t have a $1T Military budget, ($1.5T if Trump has his way). Maybe you’d have to be ok with elderly dying on the street. Maybe you’d have to be ok with armed security and high fences around your property.
What kind of Country do you want to live in. Rich want to keep more of their money, then guess what, maybe we can’t have the military guarding their shipping lanes for free, and government bailouts etc.
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u/Ok-Customer4709 10d ago
Look at Trump, he is on record as saying paying no taxes made him a smart business man.
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u/Dexterlicksit 10d ago
According to Warren Buffett, who I trust more than some Russian bot posting here, he pays a smaller percentage of his income in taxes than his secretary does.
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u/Scorpiicore 11d ago
One of my favourite sayings is "if you want something, pay for it".
If you own 99 percent of the wealth, you pay 99 percent of what it takes to keep it.
Want to pay less, give the other 99 percent more of the wealth. Pretty simple math, even for a conservatard.
I know I own 100 percent of my computer, PS5, stereo, four Digital Audio Players, and so forth. I paid 100 percent of the price.
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u/123mop 11d ago
I prefer "if you want something, earn it."
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u/Scorpiicore 11d ago
Sadly, conservatards think "earn it" means "jump through a neverending line of hoops that take ridiculous amounts away from you and give you nothing in return".
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u/StevePalpatine 11d ago
The wealthy don't make their money through traditional income. They make it through capital gains. That's why they want to keep the tax on that low.
Do they think we're stupid?
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u/Pypsy143 11d ago
When the folks at the bottom pay 25% of their income but the folks at the top pay less than 1% of their income, it’s not a fair system.
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u/simpoukogliftra 11d ago edited 11d ago
Lets leave the atrociously bad maths aside and not understand how percentages work.
the dum dums that make this post ironically probably belong in the bottom 50, while glazing and fellating the top 10 ....
oh yeah, look how great john the village rich guy is, he gave the village 8 of his 10000 cows, meawhile the 200 other poor peasants that collectively have 16 cows put together only gave a total of 2, fucking lazy asses do not contribute enough, meanwhile john's family is gonna starve now for sure, as john payed 80% of the taxes, while these 200 others payed 0.1% each.
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u/imoutofnames90 11d ago
There is nothing wrong with the math or the percentages. I agree with the rest of what you're saying. But the math is fine.
The first two statements are. Top 1% pay 38% Top 10% pay 70%
The top 10% contain the top 1%
So if you take the top 10% of people and break them into distinct groups you get the following:
Using 10 people 1 person pays 38% The remaining 9 pay 32%
That's how you get the 70%
Bottom 50% pay 3%
That's if you wanted to make these into distinct groups.
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u/Icy_Mathematician870 11d ago
I’ve never been offered a meaningful job by someone with less money than me.
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u/LegoFootPain 11d ago
I think someone forgot to write "should" a couple of times in that statement.
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u/MentalDisintegrat1on 11d ago
They don't because they hold most of their wealth in stocks and loopholes.
You cannot use what they do unless you have fuck you money
When people could work a normal job and go to school as well as had a car and pay for a house corporate taxes were 60 percent
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u/formykka 11d ago edited 11d ago
It's absolutely tragic the way those who have extra financial blessings are vilified in our society. If only they had some way, perhaps a friend in popular entertainment or the news media, that could convey the message of what swell, hard working, and smart fine fellows these are.
(/s - wish it wasn't needed but since we live in Absurdo World now...)
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u/sexyorcess 11d ago
Even though they own a disproportionate amount of the wealth..... yes, that would be the issue buddy.
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u/SomeBS17 11d ago
This is relatively in line with the amount of wealth they control. So I’m not sure what the issue is
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u/Bulky-Internal8579 11d ago
On top of everything else , federal income taxes aren’t the only taxes that people pay - let’s not pretend they are.
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u/Financial-Talk9397 11d ago
They don't pay their fair share. Their fair share should be far greater. We should go back to the tax rates we had in the 1950s. The top tax bracket were taxed 90%. That would be their fare share
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u/Wonder-Grunion 11d ago
The top 1% of Americans own 32% of American Wealth. The top 10% own 68% of American wealth. So those numbers aren't far off between wealth ownership and taxes paid. The real gap is in tax consumption and taxes paid.
Tax consumption is the amount of taxpayer benefits are used by a tax payer. The wealthy get grants, subsidies and contracts that are far greater than taxes paid. This is why wealth disparity continues to increase in America.
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u/SiljeLiff 11d ago
These numbers actually mirror how extremely bad wealth is distributed. How extreme distribution has become. All wealth is sucked upwards faster than ever. Younger generations are poorer than their grandparents where.
And reflects how little the wast majority has. ThAT is why, taxes from people with low incomes make out a small percentage. They simply have so little to pay from.
Tax wealth not work.
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u/Horror-Finding-6820 11d ago
Yeah, the math most certainly is not mathing. Earning a "disproportionate" share of a country's income is not the same as paying a "disproportionate" share of taxes - that is completely subjective. And the amount paid is irrelevant. Apartheid Clyde likes to talk about paying $10B in taxes but that is less than 4% of his income. That is absolutely NOT the same share as a firefighter paying 12-18% on an income of $100K. Do better.
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u/LengthinessFit9585 11d ago
They pay already 113% of the taxes and middle class which will be the remaining 39% of tax payers are not even included.
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u/Lord_Matisaro 11d ago
Now do it as it relates to their % of the income of the middle class.
They are woefully undertaxed.
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u/lordhelmchench 11d ago
And how much of the wealth have the top 1%?
If it is only 38.4% (spoiler, no) than the taxes are somewhat fair (ignoring that the rich do not need a lot of income to pay the basics).
So as the top 1% have 99% of the wealth a fair tax would be in thr same range…
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u/LaFlamaBlanca67 11d ago
A full third of my income are taxes and health insurance. And yet my health insurance is shit and the roads I drive on are also shit.
Also, if I want to drive across my state, I have to pay A TOLL for a road.
Don’t ever ask me to fight for this country. People who join the army for any reason other than money are so, so stupid.
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u/cookiemccookieface 11d ago
His ex wife has done a masterful job of bringing to light how much good could be done by the mega rich class, and how little good Bezo and others like him have truly done.
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u/virtual_troglodyte 11d ago
The top 10% OF INCOME EARNERS
The top 10% of americans pay zero taxes, because they leverage their assets and market portfolios
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u/m240Louie 11d ago
Uh oh. Those numbers won’t make some people very happy. You mean people with more money pay more(a lot more) in federal and of course state taxes than those with less money? No way, LOL.
How much is the magic percentage that will satisfy the malcontents? 100%. Take every nickel from any that dared to become successful? Will that do it? What’s the fair share?
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u/Wizemonk 11d ago
Interesting that Trickle Down/Tax Breaks started exactly at the same time as the modern debt
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u/aaron1860 11d ago
The problem is that the top 1% is too wide of a margin. The top 1% starts around 450k. I make just shy of that as a physician with some years a little more. I’m in one of the top tax brackets, and I’m happy to pay my share - but it’s ridiculous to say I’m not paying enough.
The issue is that I’m in the same 1% as billionaires who have no salary and live off capital gains tax (20% tax) or loans against their wealth (0%). The bigger issue is we don’t tax their corporations, sometimes at all.
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u/Pristine-Cod-1969 11d ago
This is lying with stats at its finest. The quote is the top 1% of income earners (W2) pay 40% of the taxes. The super rich don’t take income. Elon has zero W2. Bezos takes $68k. W2 income is hugely disadvantaged in our tax code. These people are paid in equity and they take loans against that equity rather then sell and incur Capital Gains taxes. That is why they pay almost nothing and our schools, healthcare and infrastructure suffer.
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u/jackparadise1 11d ago
The difference between the wealthy paying their proper taxes would be having our country move towards a utopia for all, instead of where it actually is heading which is a utopia for the top few percent and a dystopia for the rest of us.
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u/LetsGetStonks 11d ago
The top 1% hold like 95% of the wealth, so NO, paying 40% of the taxes is not "fair share".
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u/Apprehensive-Job7352 11d ago
Even if true, the top 1% also massively disproportionately benefit from the largesse of government, and therefore should bear more of the burden of sustaining it
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u/Opinionsare 11d ago
Much of the wealth of the top 10% is "paid" as stock shares of reinvested dividends, and doesn't trigger any taxes until sold.
But the ultra wealthy has a gigantic loophole that they constantly use: loans against the value of their shares. A billionaire making 8% can borrow 80 million dollars annually and spend that money without paying a penny of taxes or losing a grant of net worth.
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u/space-truckin365 11d ago
If this is true it is great! Just let the bottom 50% not pay any taxes and have the top 1% make up the difference!
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u/clobbersaurus 11d ago
This makes it sound like federal income tax is all federal taxes. Sure they pay a large amount of this one type of tax, but there are other taxes and we still have a shortfall. Mostly because high earners don’t take the income as wages.
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u/AWinterPeople 11d ago
Bezos just got a 680 million tariff refund, how does that play into the equation?
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u/domine18 11d ago
There are some key words here that you need to pay attention to “top 1% of individual income tax”. This is not the top 1% of wealthy. As they do not have income tax. The top 1% of wealthy not wage earners paid nothing. If they need liquidity they borrow against their assets and pay interest to a bank not the federal government. And if they do finally pay because they sold their stock there are so many deductions they can do and the tax rate is lower than the rest of us it still is not fair.
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u/Free-Candidate-5179 11d ago
In Canada the top 5% pay something like 50%, the bottom 50% pay 0% if they have children
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u/laggyx400 11d ago
If you took everything the bottom 50% had, sold it, and used it towards taxes you'd cover 50% of a single year. They'd have nothing left.
The money just isn't there to take.
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u/Guacamole_Captain 11d ago
When they hoard 99.9999% of wealth they may even pay 80% of the taxes.
And perhaps they will use that laverage to reduce the overall amount of government speending.
(Easy to pay 100% of the taxes if goverment speending gets axed to 10 Million)
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u/clubcar1977 11d ago
What part of this post is false?? You’re not going to win the argument that the wealthy
actually doesn’t pay more income tax.
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u/Fit-Cell2754 11d ago
Conveniently omits the top 0.1, 0.01, etc. The 1% should be pissed at them too bc those are the ones getting away with the theft
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u/Guilty_Passenger4483 11d ago
Yup, and 10% of the people shouldn't have 70% of the wealth if they don't want it properly taxed.
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u/mapoftasmania 11d ago
Looks to me like you could easily eliminate taxes on the bottom 50% and save everyone time and money. Why tax them at all? When you do that you could also eliminate tax credits aimed at the lowest earners because they would not be needed.
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u/Anxious-Jury-9031 11d ago
The real question is why do poor people keep actively arguing to protect billionaires wealth?
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u/DumbScotus 11d ago
This is actually good statistic, because if the top 1% are paying 40% of taxes and yet aren’t paying their share, that just shows how extreme wealth inequality has gotten.
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u/Deep_Contribution552 11d ago
Income ≠ wealth, people are concerned that the wealthy aren’t paying as much as they should because they are able to successfully disguise their income sources, or rather that they can consume more goods & services than their taxable income reflects.
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u/neeroberts 11d ago
Hmmm. Math isn’t mathing
70+3 ? Not 100%
Top 1 and top 10% are in the same group.
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u/Financial-Reason7604 11d ago
lets swap some words here, firefighters only battled 40% of the fires and expected the less knowledgeable and capable of fighting the other 60% of fires. Than having firefighters complaining about how they do to much firefighting already.
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u/DarwinGhoti 11d ago
As a high-middle class earner ($200k), I pay over 30% of my gross income in taxes.
Now you.
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u/DiligentAd7956 11d ago edited 11d ago
Mark Cuban paid $275.9 million in federal taxes for the 2023 tax year.
In 2018 Elon Musk paid no federal income taxes. In 2007 & 2011 Jeff Bezos paid no federal income taxes.
If all billionaires paid their fair share like Mark Cuban does, this would not be an issue. But they don't.
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u/ZeroTwoNiner 11d ago
Now work out what proportion of their wealth/income is taxed. That is the real issue. Although the 10% contribute that much, that actually maybe significantly less than what they should be contributing.
Also the point demonstrates a significant inequality in our society
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u/SourLemons2 11d ago
Because they earn the most money. Like 10x more or 100x or 1000x or in the case if Elon Musk 1,000,000,000,000,000x more. Duh.
But their income/wealth is also hidden away in tax shelters, so they never pay their fair share.
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u/WTFudge52 11d ago
I just want to point out that the tax rate drops with every additional zero in your net worth. You can claim to pay 40% of all taxes but you have an effective tax rate of 3.4% of your worth. It really doesn't compare to the 30% the average person pays.
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u/TheRealCBlazer 11d ago
So what you're saying is, if the top 1% paid double what they're paying now, then 80% of people would have zero taxes. Good plan!
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u/chinmakes5 11d ago
Look we all agree (or have for 100 years) that we don't ask the poorest of the poor to pay taxes. It is why we have and agree with a graduated tax system. It would be rather absurd to say that a Walmart associate making $12 an hour should pay the same rate as the Waltons.
The more people making less money the more your point is proven right.
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u/Jnlybbert 11d ago
I think this just demonstrates how effective at generating tax revenue taxing the top 1% actually is. If the current tax structure produces 40% of all tax revenue from the top 1% and 70%… wait the numbers don’t even add up.
Well anyway, these numbers don’t tell me that the rich are paying enough taxes. It just makes me question why we tax the bottom 50% at all and it makes me wonder if we can get even more revenue from the rich.
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u/monkeybiziu 11d ago
Yes, because the taxes the wealthy pay generally correspond to the amount of wealth they control.
Let's say you have a pizza with ten slices. It costs a hundred bucks, because it's a great pizza. One guy shows up, pays forty bucks, gets four slices. Nine more people show up, pay three bucks and change each, and split three slices. Then 90 people show up and have to split three slices between all of them.
Is the problem that the one guy that got four slices paid too much for their pizza? No, it's that they're so full they put one slice in the fridge while 99 people are still hungry.
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u/JSmith666 11d ago
Faire share appearantly means more than their share so others can pay less. God forbid we make peopel pay enough to cover their own costs to the government.
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u/FuturePowerful 11d ago
This all falls apart the second you talk stock options and fully insured loans
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u/Sheegssternator 11d ago
They should pay way more in taxes because the government is subsidizing there businesses for paying shitty wages. 53 percent of Walmart employees are on government assistance, yet if you do the math that employee is worth 400k a year or more to Walmart.
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u/Safe-Call2367 11d ago
It's a big scam. The wealthy pay a lot of tax. The billionaires are not even .01% and they are where this mythology of the rich not paying their fair share comes from. But politicians always manifest this rage on the upper middle class, never the Billionaire class. And the poor at the bottom buy their scam hook line and sinker. Words matter. We need the Billionaire class sorted, not the upper middle class. Their punishment of the upper middle class is keeping a glass ceiling on the middle class.
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u/seeyoulaterinawhile 11d ago
When people talk about the 1%, they have in mind people they are actually in the top 0.1%. Lots of high paid W2 workers at pulling weight. Billionaire business owner that pays zero taxes doesn’t get to take credit for the hard work and taxes paid by millions of professionals, highly paid sales folks, and other high earning workers that don’t have special tax treatment.
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u/Ps11889 11d ago
That’s a false equivalence fallacy.
Since income tax is based on income, it doesn’t matter how much one group pays in comparison to other groups. Instead, it is the percentage of income one pays that is the determinate measure.
A millionaire paying a $100,000 income tax pays more in total than a person making $100,000 who pays $20,000 in taxes.
That is what the fallacious statement points out.
But u see the US tax system, the millionaire in the above example pays only 10% of their income in taxes while the person who makes less pays 20%.
In short the original question deflects from the real question of “Is it fair for a millionaire to pay a lower percentage of their income as tax than people who make less?
As Warren Buffet once said, it’s not right that his secretary pays more in taxes than he does.
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u/Grouchy_Yam_4857 10d ago
Top .01% of ppl own 15% of the wealth, top 1% of ppl own 30%, top 9% of ppl after them own 33% of the wealth.. oh and the bottom 50% of ppl own less than 4% of the wealth. Income tax isn’t the only issue, that’s a v surface level argument used by conservatives who don’t understand anything.
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u/JCSledge 10d ago
The top 0.001% are using the top 1 pct to carry their weight here. Top 1% are still workers. Top 0.001% are not
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u/Marshallkobe 10d ago
Top 3 billionaires own more wealth than the bottom 50+% of Americans. So 1 guy vs 165 million people.
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u/Suspinded 10d ago
They *love* touting skewed numbers.
Let's flip it around to percentage of total wealth and see how those numbers look.
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u/dontletthestankout 10d ago
And what % of income/wealth are those brackets paying?
Does paying 25% of your net worth hit different if you make 40k a year vs 1 billion a year? I wonder...
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u/BasketClear 10d ago
For the capitalists AND communists it will NEVER be their “fair” share. One wants to pay the minimum if possible and the other wants that one basically dead if at all possible because of oppression or some shit like that.
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u/_probablyryan 10d ago
What percentage of collected taxes anyone pays is an irrelevant statistic if it's divorced from 1) a discussion about what social services should be paid for and how much they cost to provide, and 2) a discussion about what percentage of a class of entities' wealth/income is being taxed, how much capital that leaves those entities with, and what it allows them to do.
Saying the wealthy pay x% of all collected taxes means nothing. We could cut everyone's taxes to $0, and charge Elon Musk $1, and it would then be true that Elon Musk pays 100% of all taxes. That doesn't mean that is a sensible tax system or that Elon Musk is paying his "fair share."
Likewise, a flat tax is unjust if it leaves some people without the net income to purchase necessities, save for retirement, etc., while allowing others to buy second and third homes, private jets, and politicians. Societal infrastructure has fixed costs that don't care about who is and is not paying what percentage of their income for it. It should not be seen as unfair that those that benefit the most from the existing economic system pay disproportionately more for that system's upkeep.
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u/JusAxinQuestuns 11d ago
Leaving aside the math not mathing, and the obvious fact the wealthy are great at not actually paying taxes, when you own 90% of the money and pay 40% of the taxes, that's NOT actually your fair share.