[MurkyLabs]

It's less about raising taxes on people making less than 250,000 a year and more on getting people who make over 1,000,000 pay taxes at all. Sure there's plenty of people who aren't rich that commit tax fraud but the IRS is pretty good at getting them. Getting the millionaires who can throw lawyers at them to waste time makes it not worth it. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer

[FredPret]

I don't know how this is even a talking point.

The top 5% of taxpayers in the USA pay 61% of the taxes.

The top 1% pay 30-40% of all the taxes and have done so for decades.

https://usafacts.org/articles/who-pays-the-most-income-tax/

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

[wadadadad]

When the top 5% makes 3x more than the bottom 50%? The top 5% makes 38% of the total, while the top 1% alone makes 22%, per the same sources you just quoted. Yes, the ones who make the most can afford to pay the most in taxes.

You didn't even cover GP's main point about getting the top to even pay taxes; the top 1%, per your own source, only pays 26%, while the top 50% pays 16%.

Top x% tax bracket should at least be 32%, per current brackets. So one could argue they aren't even paying what they 'should'. https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...

[dmoy]

> The top 5% of taxpayers in the USA pay 61% of the taxes.

Only if you ignore the payroll tax.

For the median US worker, they pay ~15% in payroll tax, and significantly less in income tax. The median US worker makes $40k year, paying like $6k in payroll tax and like $2.8k in federal income tax.

So yes, if you ignore the majority of tax that the average worker pays, then the top 5% pay the majority of tax.

[danaris]

The useful statistic is not "what percentage of the taxes do each quintile/decile/etc pay?"

It's "What percentage of their disposable income (ie, net of housing, food, health care, and other necessary expenses) do each quintile/decile/etc pay in taxes?"

And the answer is going to be that the middle and working classes pay a huge percentage—close to 100% for many—while for the wealthy it's effectively nothing.

[travisporter]

I think looking at the top 5% of wealth, not just taxpayers, may open up the conversation on both sides

[lesuorac]

> The top 1% pay 30-40% of all the taxes and have done so for decades.

That's kinda the problem. We've been running a deficit for decades because the top tax rate has been cut.

[jdhwosnhw]

I’ve heard this statistic before and it always strikes me as basically a non-sequitor. You’re writing down two percentages as if they are meaningful with respect to one another, but they arent.

If we as a society agree that some sort of progressive tax system is good (based on the fact that the mere act of survival comes with fixed costs, that naturally impact low-wealth holders over high-wealth holders) then we presumably expect higher wealth people to shoulder a larger burden of the cost of maintaining society, relative to that wealth.

The top 1% hold >30% of all wealth in the US, which, by the logic I described above, makes your 40% figure sound not just not exorbitant, but possibly too low.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...

[hiatus]

People making one million dollars a year are people like doctors and lawyers and are most certainly paying taxes. One million dollars today was ~$680k in 2008.