[gottorf]

> Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.

> That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.

Is your reasoning that the amount of household wealth and income at each percentile should hold roughly constant over the years, as if this is some law of physics?

[xboxnolifes]

Law of physics? No. The reasoning is that if the top percentile is rising instead of staying relatively constant, wealth inequality is getting worse.

[toss1]

>>as if this is some law of physics?

Seriously? Way to miss the point by miles

The point is: the absolute values are bad the direction and magnitude of change indicates it is getting worse.

The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%.

When the most wealthy society in the history of the planet still has large portions of its population living one missed paycheck or one illness/accident away from being destitute, or being already destitute, while a few at the top have orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, something is deeply wrong.

The change numbers show this already the case nearly four decades ago, it has gotten worse.

So yes, the glib argument that "the 1% already pay 90% of federal taxes..." is just as spurious as it is vacuous.

Not only does it ignore the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation, it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden, and the poor and middle classes pay vastly more of the other taxes such as sales tax, gasoline and road taxes, fees, etc. IOW, you are cherry-picking, and badly.

[gottorf]

> The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%.

> the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation

How do you or anyone else know what's optimal and what's misallocated?

> it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden

Income tax is roughly half of federal receipts and is the single largest source, with payroll taxes the next largest at about a third.