[esolyt]

I'm not sure the best way to change minds is using a facetious tone and quoting meticulously-crafted numbers from a right-wing think tank.

Billionaires get richer through asset appreciation, not income. The White House report is focusing on how fast the rich are getting richer and that's how they arrived at 8%.

A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%, whereas a wealthy person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%. And that is if they realize the gains at all, because their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.

Our current system (in which long term capital gains tax is much lower than income tax) rewards the owner class and punishes the workers.

The figures are misleading because if you have low income, your effective tax rate is indeed lower than the wealthy. But then you're barely surviving anyway. So if you're poor, you're screwed because you're poor. If you have a livable income, you're screwed because of high taxes. But if you're wealthy, the system exists to serve you.

[samatman]

The IRS is not a right wing think tank, the source is quoted immediately and you can find it here: https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat...

You will discover that the numbers are reported correctly.

> A worker's salary is taxed at a high rate like up to 40%

The bottom 50% are taxed at 3.35% of income. That's the IRS' number, not something "meticulously crafted by a right-wing think tank". Or completely made up.

> their unrealized gains don't get taxed at all.

Good. It would be an absolute disaster to tax unrealized gains because, well: they're unrealized. I'm sure the numerous serious problems with doing that will occur to anyone thinking about the question honestly for a little while. The most obvious would be the total destruction of what social mobility we do have.

> a wealthy [sic] person's gains from assets are taxed at a much lower rate like 15%

This is insufficiently general. Anyone's gains from assets are taxed at a 15% rate for long-term gains. 60% of American families are homeowners, so it isn't correct to gloss receiving capital gains as exclusively the province of the wealthy.

As I said before, I support progressive taxation, and a higher rate for people who own (not earn) in the top 0.1%, say 20%, is something I would support.

But 15% is 4.5x of 3.35%, so in no world are the very wealthy paying a lower rate of tax than workers. It just isn't true. Therefore, if the OG poster got their wish, the 'capitalists' would pay much less tax, and the workers would pay a great deal more.