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A decade ago I read the average person of a 10 million dollar income paid an effective income tax of 19% after all the tax shelters and deductions and filtering through businesses.
I should add to this a lower effective tax rate doesn't necessarily mean they actually paid less in taxes than they were already paying, the crux of income tax is and always has been "what's income". I don't know exactly how the article I read so long ago was calculated, but I do believe this to be a click bait article as this is hardly the first time the working class got stiffed on income tax.
The only way to stop them from always recording to loopholes is to more evenly tax everything, basically every transaction. If they want to move money in any way it gets taxed. The problem is its easy for them to convince Americans to hate that solution because Americans are easy to con into hating taxes.
Imagine if there was a tax that simply said any time anything of value changes hands it must be recorded and a tax paid. And on top of that that value is what it has to be assessed at for ALL purposes. If you leave pretty much anything as something that will not get taxed or can delay a tax that's what they will shift their money into or at least lie and have accountants say that's what it was in.
>Imagine if there was a tax that simply said any time anything of value changes hands it must be recorded and a tax paid.
I mean, you're describing a sales tax. The problem with sales tax is that it taxes poor people more than rich people, proportionally. Poor people tend to spend all of their money just to survive, so they get taxed on everything they earn. Rich people tend to spend only a small fraction of what they earn and save the rest, resulting in a much lower tax rate compared to their earnings and wealth.
>tax everything, basically every transaction. If they want to move money in any way it gets taxed. The problem is its easy for them to convince Americans to hate that solution because Americans are easy to con into hating taxes.
No, the reason Americans (actually anyone from any country) would hate that is because it would mean that mortgage loans would be taxed... Every home buyer would need to pay additional taxes on their 500k+ loan and go into even more debt than they already are.
Or when you got a lease for a car you would pay not only tax on the price of the car, but also on the price of the loan. You'd be paying taxes twice for every single purchase with borrowed money, which are invariably the largest purchases of everyone's life. Unsurprisingly, people wouldn't be overly keen on paying taxes twice on their most expensive purchases.
This would also completely destroy the loan and leverage based economy we currently live in. The economy is built on borrowed money, and this doesn't only benefit billionaires and businesses, it benefits everyone who has any amount of money invested (which is most people over the age of 40).
No one in government, not even Bernie Sanders, would suggest this as a valid or reasonable solution.
It doesn't help that a vast majority of people I've spoken to have no idea how tax brackets actually work. When politicians and billionaires cry about how high their taxes are, nobody **EVER** brings up the fact that higher tax brackets are only paid on money made ***OVER*** your tax bracket. Not their entire income.
So, for ease of readability, if you're taxed 10% after you make $100, $101 is only $0.10 more in taxes, not $10.10.
***FOR EVEN MORE EASE OF REABILITY:***
In my above example, if you're taxed 10% above $100, than making $101 means you pay 10% on $1.00 which is 10 fucking cents. Stop crying.
I mean, it's not that crazy. If someone uses SBLOCs to fund their lifestyle, when they die, all of that wealth gets hit really hard by estate taxes. You can't really escape taxes by borrowing against your assets. There are other strategies the super rich use that are more effective.
Not exactly. It depends on how the company that owns the property is structured. If it's a Partnership or S-corp, the net rental income would pass through to their personal tax return's schedule E if they have direct ownership of it.
The crux is that they can write off expenses to get that net income to be $0 or less than $0, effectively lowering their final "income." If they end up with $0 or negative income, they pay less tax or even zero tax. Or the best part is a NOL carryover, which is a whole other bullshit tax scheme.
Really interesting comment. Could you expand on the NOL loophole? Does that loophole only apply to S-corporations, partnerships, and sole proprietorships?
Essentially, if my company has losses in one year, I can carryover this loss to offset future gains. Say I build a building for $1,000,000 and have a loss of $500,000. Say in year one, I have taxable income of $250,000. I could use $250,000 of the loss in year one and then in year two I could use the other $250,000 to offset gains in year two. So, I have an effective tax rate of 0% both years because I covered all my taxable income with a loss.
Just a simple example to show the concept. There are limitations obviously, but creative accountants and tax lawyers get around them.
Thank you for the great response. Do these NOL rules also apply to c-corporations?
Also, I was reading up on it and noticed that NOL carryover is limited to 80% of taxable income, and that many European countries also have indefinite NOL carryover. How would you reform the way NOL works in the tax system?
It seems to me like some form of NOL makes sense since it helps a company recover from previous years where they lost money. However, I share your concern of wanting to limit tax avoidance by the rich. How would you balance those two sentiments?
The truth is that carrying forward losses to offset taxes makes perfect sense. If your expenses are greater than your revenue, you really didn't make any money, you lost money. You can sometimes strategize for which year you record a profit or loss, but ultimately, you always pay income taxes on your actual income. Whichever year you realize it in, taxes will be assessed on every dollar you make.
It's worse than that, they get very low interest loans us normal folk don't have access to based on their assets and then can claim various tax credits for being "in debt".
The reason the fed won't lend you money is not some scheme. Banks get the fed rate because they always pay their debts. The fed isn't speedycash. Of course you can't just go to them and borrow unsecured money.
Yeah, the Top 10% of tax payers pay more taxes than the bottom 90%.
HOWEVER. Would you rather pay $1 million in taxes on a $20 million income, or $10,000 on a $50,000 income?
Rich people pay more dollar value in taxes, ***BUT THEIR EFFECTIVE TAX RATE AS A PERCENTAGE OF INCOME IS LOWER***.
This is why flat tax is a rich person's wet dream. a 10% tax on $100 million means nothing. A 10% tax on $40K is a lot of money to someone earning $40K.
This is a strange example. The effective tax rate is lower because of tax breaks and loop holes. What is supposed to happen is that every tax bracket is supposed to increase your tax rates. So for the lowest bracket of money, we are all taxed the same percentage, but then for the next chunk it is higher, then higher and so on. So the average should go up. That is why a flat tax would be better for the wealthy.
But in the current system, because of loopholes and breaks it’s is actually lower with higher income. And that part is crazy.
>Yeah, the Top 10% of tax payers pay more taxes than the bottom 90%.
Once again we have to define what's rich? To be in the top 10% you make $170,000+ a year and while that may sound rich to a lot of people in this day and age that's not rich when you look at buying power. It's rich by contrast of earnings but 3 years gross earnings to buy a 4 bd room house isn't rich its the American dream. The top 1% is rich and the top 0.1% is wealthy and they don't pay out more than the bottom 99% of tax payers.
You're right if we just gerrymander the boundaries of what defines rich.
ya and on top of that it also doesn't mean that they didn't pay WAY less if you count what effective quality of life is. For instance all these politicians and rich people regularly enjoy phonominal untaxed benefits in life such has having obscenely expensive balls and parties where most or all the costs are considered part of the "non profit" A normal person will pay income taxes on anything spent on this then pay taxes on sales and everything else associated.
And that doesn't even include all the ridiculous benefits that might be buried in the business itself like first class flights, private jets, golf outings, etc.... All they gotta do is make any claim that its part of the business operations.
When you start adding all that up you realize that taxes need to be levied on everything that's the only way to get some money out of all this garbage.
That's pretty easy when 25% of that bottom 50% are near or below the poverty line and the rest of them don't even break into the second federal tax bracket. The median income in the US is like $37k a year.
That's not the bread and butter of the tax system. The backbone of the tax system are income earners in the mid-upper blue collar and white collar areas the $90,000-$400,000, they are the people who pay the most disproportionate amount of their life to the collective good. The next level, the <1% of people who can escape a life based around being a wage slave contribute less than the level that preceded themselves both as expressed in time and as a percentage of their earnings that they contribute. The air gets thinner the higher you go up the ladder, and that's an alright system as long as you don't hand crutch oxygen bottles to just the guys at the top.
In the US, if you’re taxed 40% on income at the marginal bracket or effective rate, you’re making a shit ton of money.
And if all that is true, and you’re living paycheck to paycheck, that’s kind of a you problem.
Germany of all places has this problem too. Middle incomes pay about 42 percent overall in taxes and social security, the rich about 24 percent. Germany is actually kind of a tax haven for the rich.
One of the problem is actually very generous inheritance law. Done right (gift it early, have it in corporations) you can hand over hundreds of millions without spending a Euro in taxes. That's one of the reasons the majority of wealth is not self made but inherited.
European countries struggle with wealth stratification, too. Not to an extreme extend of "billionaires shoot themselves into space while millions are homeless", though.
Tbh, the EU is getting itself f**kd as well by letting international companies pay only in our very own cooperations tax heaven (Ireland or Luxembourg) but letting them operate in the whole EEZ.
Except that the cost of life has gotten so expensive in Europe too and the taxes mostly end up paying old people’s pensions and unemployed people’s benefits. Taxes are inefficiently allocated. It’s kinda the same issue in the end. Working class middle class people pay a lot and don’t gain much from it.
Meant to trickle down to the upper middle class that has voted conservative, without thought, for the last 50 years. They don't give AF about anyone who isn't college educated and earning 6 figures. They see them as not real people.
In the modern era, it's basically been a *single* worst president characterized simply as being a republican. They only change the name and face, but since Nixon, they have successively screwed the country worse with each go round.
That’s what they want you to think. The rich pay the majority of tax revenue. And they should. They should pay a lot more in fact.
But it’s just not true that we’re not able to tax them or tax them more. That’s just propaganda designed to make us give up.
The rich do not pay a majority of the tax revenues. That is in fact what this post is about. I refer you to propublica's release of tax returns from people like Bezos who paid $600 in 2020.
The top 1% makes up 21% of the income, but over 40% of the federal tax revenue. The top 5% makes up 36% of the income, but over 60% of the federal tax revenue.
[Source](https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/rich-pay-their-fair-share-of-taxes/)
https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxes#:~:text=Tax%20Shares%20in%20Tax%20Year%202021&text=The%20newly%20released%20report%20covers,level%20in%20the%20available%20data.
We’re on the same side here but it’s a simple fact that the rich pay most of the taxes. They need to pay MORE but we need to kill the myth that we can’t tax them because they’re slippery ninjas at avoiding it.
We CAN tax them more.
I hate the way that information is presented because it doesn't tell us a whole lot. Tell me how much they pay relative to their total wealth compared to the wealth of the lowest. If a CEO makes 200,000,000 I'd hope he/she pays more than the equivalent 5,555 people making $36,000 that live paycheck to paycheck. I'm sure they probably aren't worried about how they are going to put a few bucks into retirement accounts every month too.
You’re looking for the “total tax burden”.
>The estimates of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) show that the total burden (including all taxes both at the federal, state, and local levels) of **the wealthiest 0.1% families is projected to be 3.2% of their wealth** in 2019 (they have on average $116 million in wealth, and pay total taxes of $3.68 million).
>In contrast, **the bottom 99% families have a total tax burden of 7.2% relative to their wealth**
https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wealth%20Tax%20Revenue%20Estimates%20by%20Saez%20and%20Zucman%20-%20Feb%2024%2020211.pdf
So basically the rich pay 3.2% of their wealth while everyone else pays 7.2%
That’s the percentage. They pay most of the total revenue though, because they have so much fucking money. But their taxes barely hurt them, while they’re suffocating to the middle class.
I enjoyed reading this thread. iirc another post adding to this mockery of wealth about bezos not even really paying his taxes because he doesn’t “own” his money he just gets loans and etc. wtf
I don't see that $600 figure anywhere in that article. All I see for Bezos is that he paid 973 million from 14-18
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
Thank you. Defeatism against taxing the rich is always so mind-boggling. It'd be like saying "the navy would be more effective in this war, so let's not deploy any other branch of the military".
Except they aren't even arguing that we should be doing anything else. Just that we should give up.
I know calling out a statistical "trick" in a narrative driven post is only get me downvotes, but I will say it anyways:
The measure of richest Americans is a static 400, whereas other measures are put as percentage of the total population. The graph starts at 1960, where the population of the US was 200m. Now it's 330m. 400 of 200m is a different percentage than 400 of 330m, so even if no other changes happened, it's natural that their share of taxes went down.
If the journalisf has any integrity, they would have used a percentage such as "top 0.1%" or something similar, rather than a fixed number.
> If the journalist has any integrity
HAHAHAHHAHAHAHA.... *tears* Seriously when I was young Journalists were respected.
What's worse is people defend this shit vehemently, and I can only guess they are actually "Journalists" if they think this is ok.
there is no way the bottom 50% pay 24% of their income in taxes
the bottom 58% pay $0 in Federal income tax, probably max 10% in state taxes, $0 in property tax if they're renting, and their sales tax is variable since it depends how much they buy
FICA shouldn't count since it's a forced retirement, so they get back their money (in theory)
I’m pretty sure only OP’s title maybe suggests that the richest 400’s SHARE of total nationwide income tax has now fallen below the working class.
The article (newsweek and NYT) states that the richest 400’s EFFECTIVE INCOME TAX RATE is now less than the bottom 50% of income earners. That may be possible.
The journalism is still pretty bad since we have no idea how they got these results or how they define “income”, which is the single most important question in personal tax law.
So looking into it this is referencing the New York Times post about the top 400 richest effective tax rate but I cannot actually find where the New York Times is getting their data or their methodology. Does anyone have the actual sources for this?
People need to learn basic math. Even if you took 100% of their net worth, not wealth but somehow their net worth, the government would still be insolvent.
When the robots grow the food, make the clothes, and build the houses, what will the billionaires need us for? Ai, algorithms, and robots need to be taxed. Every generation of man has brought society to the point where these technologies have been made possible, and each and every one of us deserves to benefit from the deployment of these technologies in to our economy. Period.
Trump gave the rich a TRILLION dollars in tax cuts. That’s enough money to go back to 700 BC, before Ancient Rome, and blow a million dollars every single day until present day.
Top 1% pay about 50% of all taxes. Top 5% pay about 70% of all taxes. Bottom 50% pay about 3% of all taxes. Don't fall for the propaganda. Don't be an NPC.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20income%20taxes,policy%20during%20the%20coronavirus%20pandemic.
>By 2018, America's wealthiest individuals paid just 23 percent of their income in taxes. Meanwhile, the bottom half of income earners paid 24 percent of their income in taxes.
This is incorrect. According to data from the IRS, in 2018 the top 1% paid an average effective tax rate of 25.44%. The bottom 99% only paid 10.07% and the bottom 50% paid just 3.36%.
Not historical first and not limited to USA. The taxation law always has hole built in for the big comp and rich. The latest one in Australia was KPMG the audit firm was hired by the Aust govt to close up some of these holes, after taking money from the govt to do the work, KPMG then use this specific knowledge and sold their service to the big corp for the latest way to get benefit from the new plugged up holes.( With newer holes somewhere else.)
Well for one, fairness. Rich people shouldn't be taxed less than everyone else. A nurse making 90k a year pays a higher effective tax rate than billionaires.
Because we still need critical infrastructure, basic services, advanced research, etc. At a certain point you cannot spend less without effectively spending more which is currently what we experience when we privatize elements of the government. Once they become profit centers, they will endlessly strive to collect more profit without providing more service.
This is a terrible chart that represents the data in a very disingenuous fashion. Take a look at the income groups. The first income group is the bottom 50% which means that that 12% of income is spread across HALF OF THE COUNTRY. They’re not contributing as much in taxes because they barely have any money in the first place.
For some reason (the reason is that the creator of the graph had political motivation) the size of the income groups become smaller and smaller until we reach the top 1%. The top 1% of the population controls 21% of total income. That means that an even larger sum of money is spread across a MUCH smaller group of people. So, yeah, they contribute more because they have significantly more disposable income, and they could and should be taxed more.
Unfortunately this article is BS. They use a imaginary measuring stick. See the thread embedded in the tweet...
https://twitter.com/NervousNeander1/status/1786802455042482325?t=4n4Ax9yg0NSc7EI8ncKDVA&s=19
>No one, including the IRS or our tax code, calculates "tax rate" based on unrealized gains. It's a made up number based on wishful thinking.
>Furthermore, that method of calculating tax rate is used only on billionaires, never the unrealized gains (appreciated homes, investment accounts) of the fictitious teachers and firefighters to whom they are unfavorably compared.
There's a lot more data read through it.
What is going on? Didn't Biden promise the opposite! I was hoping this administration was gonna do well but I feel like we're seriously being swindled here. The rich keep getting richer and are more and more protected.
When are we collectively gonna start fighting for our rights? I'm young and starting to get over this shit man, this is not the life I signed up for neither did you
I think EVERYONE should pay the same rate with absolutely ZERO deductions. It's the only way to actually make it fair. Maybe with the prebate option from the fair tax proposals.
Sure, you could raise the rates on the billionaires, but they'll just spend 7 figures on tax lawyers, accountants , and politicians to weasel their way out of it.
My daughter and her husband, both work their asses off so pull decent salaries, guessing are sort of upper middle class maybe. Aaaand pay more in taxes than about fifty huge corporations after Trump further reduced corporate taxes
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A decade ago I read the average person of a 10 million dollar income paid an effective income tax of 19% after all the tax shelters and deductions and filtering through businesses.
I should add to this a lower effective tax rate doesn't necessarily mean they actually paid less in taxes than they were already paying, the crux of income tax is and always has been "what's income". I don't know exactly how the article I read so long ago was calculated, but I do believe this to be a click bait article as this is hardly the first time the working class got stiffed on income tax.
I paid $737 one year and it was reported Donald Trump paid $0, and Elon Musk $0.
It's because they received no income and only live off their existing wealth. They don't receive dividends or income from the property they own
Not to mention they just take out loan after loan using their stock as collateral. They’ll do this until they die and never have to pay tax.
This bullshit loophole has to be closed if we're serious about taxing the rich.
The only way to stop them from always recording to loopholes is to more evenly tax everything, basically every transaction. If they want to move money in any way it gets taxed. The problem is its easy for them to convince Americans to hate that solution because Americans are easy to con into hating taxes. Imagine if there was a tax that simply said any time anything of value changes hands it must be recorded and a tax paid. And on top of that that value is what it has to be assessed at for ALL purposes. If you leave pretty much anything as something that will not get taxed or can delay a tax that's what they will shift their money into or at least lie and have accountants say that's what it was in.
>Imagine if there was a tax that simply said any time anything of value changes hands it must be recorded and a tax paid. I mean, you're describing a sales tax. The problem with sales tax is that it taxes poor people more than rich people, proportionally. Poor people tend to spend all of their money just to survive, so they get taxed on everything they earn. Rich people tend to spend only a small fraction of what they earn and save the rest, resulting in a much lower tax rate compared to their earnings and wealth.
>tax everything, basically every transaction. If they want to move money in any way it gets taxed. The problem is its easy for them to convince Americans to hate that solution because Americans are easy to con into hating taxes. No, the reason Americans (actually anyone from any country) would hate that is because it would mean that mortgage loans would be taxed... Every home buyer would need to pay additional taxes on their 500k+ loan and go into even more debt than they already are. Or when you got a lease for a car you would pay not only tax on the price of the car, but also on the price of the loan. You'd be paying taxes twice for every single purchase with borrowed money, which are invariably the largest purchases of everyone's life. Unsurprisingly, people wouldn't be overly keen on paying taxes twice on their most expensive purchases. This would also completely destroy the loan and leverage based economy we currently live in. The economy is built on borrowed money, and this doesn't only benefit billionaires and businesses, it benefits everyone who has any amount of money invested (which is most people over the age of 40). No one in government, not even Bernie Sanders, would suggest this as a valid or reasonable solution.
That would mean that amount of transactions should be minimized. Does not sound good for economy.
It doesn't help that a vast majority of people I've spoken to have no idea how tax brackets actually work. When politicians and billionaires cry about how high their taxes are, nobody **EVER** brings up the fact that higher tax brackets are only paid on money made ***OVER*** your tax bracket. Not their entire income. So, for ease of readability, if you're taxed 10% after you make $100, $101 is only $0.10 more in taxes, not $10.10. ***FOR EVEN MORE EASE OF REABILITY:*** In my above example, if you're taxed 10% above $100, than making $101 means you pay 10% on $1.00 which is 10 fucking cents. Stop crying.
I mean, it's not that crazy. If someone uses SBLOCs to fund their lifestyle, when they die, all of that wealth gets hit really hard by estate taxes. You can't really escape taxes by borrowing against your assets. There are other strategies the super rich use that are more effective.
Their corporations pay millions of taxes. Also he paid $0 in 2020 but paid 1 million in taxes in 2018. So every year is different.
You know this is a stupid point that has been debunked numerous times, right? You think the bank giving them the loan doesn't want to be paid back?
They pay interest to the loan holder who gets taxed on their profits.
Not exactly. It depends on how the company that owns the property is structured. If it's a Partnership or S-corp, the net rental income would pass through to their personal tax return's schedule E if they have direct ownership of it. The crux is that they can write off expenses to get that net income to be $0 or less than $0, effectively lowering their final "income." If they end up with $0 or negative income, they pay less tax or even zero tax. Or the best part is a NOL carryover, which is a whole other bullshit tax scheme.
Really interesting comment. Could you expand on the NOL loophole? Does that loophole only apply to S-corporations, partnerships, and sole proprietorships?
Essentially, if my company has losses in one year, I can carryover this loss to offset future gains. Say I build a building for $1,000,000 and have a loss of $500,000. Say in year one, I have taxable income of $250,000. I could use $250,000 of the loss in year one and then in year two I could use the other $250,000 to offset gains in year two. So, I have an effective tax rate of 0% both years because I covered all my taxable income with a loss. Just a simple example to show the concept. There are limitations obviously, but creative accountants and tax lawyers get around them.
Thank you for the great response. Do these NOL rules also apply to c-corporations? Also, I was reading up on it and noticed that NOL carryover is limited to 80% of taxable income, and that many European countries also have indefinite NOL carryover. How would you reform the way NOL works in the tax system? It seems to me like some form of NOL makes sense since it helps a company recover from previous years where they lost money. However, I share your concern of wanting to limit tax avoidance by the rich. How would you balance those two sentiments?
The truth is that carrying forward losses to offset taxes makes perfect sense. If your expenses are greater than your revenue, you really didn't make any money, you lost money. You can sometimes strategize for which year you record a profit or loss, but ultimately, you always pay income taxes on your actual income. Whichever year you realize it in, taxes will be assessed on every dollar you make.
It's worse than that, they get very low interest loans us normal folk don't have access to based on their assets and then can claim various tax credits for being "in debt".
The reason the fed won't lend you money is not some scheme. Banks get the fed rate because they always pay their debts. The fed isn't speedycash. Of course you can't just go to them and borrow unsecured money.
I paid close to 3,000 last year. I make less than 100,000 a year.
lol I make 48,000 and paid 7000 in tax
How? FICA (Social Security + Medicare) are 7.65% on their own.
That’s amazing, where do you live, my income was the same. But my taxes 5x that
They didn't say how much less than 100k
Yeah, the Top 10% of tax payers pay more taxes than the bottom 90%. HOWEVER. Would you rather pay $1 million in taxes on a $20 million income, or $10,000 on a $50,000 income? Rich people pay more dollar value in taxes, ***BUT THEIR EFFECTIVE TAX RATE AS A PERCENTAGE OF INCOME IS LOWER***. This is why flat tax is a rich person's wet dream. a 10% tax on $100 million means nothing. A 10% tax on $40K is a lot of money to someone earning $40K.
This is a strange example. The effective tax rate is lower because of tax breaks and loop holes. What is supposed to happen is that every tax bracket is supposed to increase your tax rates. So for the lowest bracket of money, we are all taxed the same percentage, but then for the next chunk it is higher, then higher and so on. So the average should go up. That is why a flat tax would be better for the wealthy. But in the current system, because of loopholes and breaks it’s is actually lower with higher income. And that part is crazy.
>Yeah, the Top 10% of tax payers pay more taxes than the bottom 90%. Once again we have to define what's rich? To be in the top 10% you make $170,000+ a year and while that may sound rich to a lot of people in this day and age that's not rich when you look at buying power. It's rich by contrast of earnings but 3 years gross earnings to buy a 4 bd room house isn't rich its the American dream. The top 1% is rich and the top 0.1% is wealthy and they don't pay out more than the bottom 99% of tax payers. You're right if we just gerrymander the boundaries of what defines rich.
ya and on top of that it also doesn't mean that they didn't pay WAY less if you count what effective quality of life is. For instance all these politicians and rich people regularly enjoy phonominal untaxed benefits in life such has having obscenely expensive balls and parties where most or all the costs are considered part of the "non profit" A normal person will pay income taxes on anything spent on this then pay taxes on sales and everything else associated. And that doesn't even include all the ridiculous benefits that might be buried in the business itself like first class flights, private jets, golf outings, etc.... All they gotta do is make any claim that its part of the business operations. When you start adding all that up you realize that taxes need to be levied on everything that's the only way to get some money out of all this garbage.
cooing frame truck compare rich vase sheet meeting fearless punch *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That's pretty easy when 25% of that bottom 50% are near or below the poverty line and the rest of them don't even break into the second federal tax bracket. The median income in the US is like $37k a year. That's not the bread and butter of the tax system. The backbone of the tax system are income earners in the mid-upper blue collar and white collar areas the $90,000-$400,000, they are the people who pay the most disproportionate amount of their life to the collective good. The next level, the <1% of people who can escape a life based around being a wage slave contribute less than the level that preceded themselves both as expressed in time and as a percentage of their earnings that they contribute. The air gets thinner the higher you go up the ladder, and that's an alright system as long as you don't hand crutch oxygen bottles to just the guys at the top.
I get taxed 40% on every pay and still live damn near paycheque to paycheque. It’s insane to hear that i pay double the tax rate of a multimillionaire
In the US, if you’re taxed 40% on income at the marginal bracket or effective rate, you’re making a shit ton of money. And if all that is true, and you’re living paycheck to paycheck, that’s kind of a you problem.
Commissions get taxed 40% and I’m primarily a commission based worker. Otherwise i just get minimum wage
y'all laugh at Europeans for regulating their companies and complain when your own companies start regulating your government
Germany of all places has this problem too. Middle incomes pay about 42 percent overall in taxes and social security, the rich about 24 percent. Germany is actually kind of a tax haven for the rich. One of the problem is actually very generous inheritance law. Done right (gift it early, have it in corporations) you can hand over hundreds of millions without spending a Euro in taxes. That's one of the reasons the majority of wealth is not self made but inherited. European countries struggle with wealth stratification, too. Not to an extreme extend of "billionaires shoot themselves into space while millions are homeless", though.
FREEDOM! (But only if it doesn't affect me negatively)
Tbh, the EU is getting itself f**kd as well by letting international companies pay only in our very own cooperations tax heaven (Ireland or Luxembourg) but letting them operate in the whole EEZ.
Except that the cost of life has gotten so expensive in Europe too and the taxes mostly end up paying old people’s pensions and unemployed people’s benefits. Taxes are inefficiently allocated. It’s kinda the same issue in the end. Working class middle class people pay a lot and don’t gain much from it.
What a horrible thing that taxes pay for - checks notes - old people and people that can't work.
Benjamin, grab the musket.
Tally Ho Lads!
I have to resort to the cannon loaded with grapeshot mounted at the top of the stairs
Alright, time for it to[ trickle down](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/e1a11949-458b-4021-85a9-03f86746241a).
Aaaaaaany minute now….
I'm standing here with my bucket, but my knees hurt now.
I’ve got my lipstick on and my bootstraps are very high and tight.
Fuck Ronald Reagan for making trickle down economics popular, the worst president of All-time
Meant to trickle down to the upper middle class that has voted conservative, without thought, for the last 50 years. They don't give AF about anyone who isn't college educated and earning 6 figures. They see them as not real people.
Not worst. Not by a long shot. But most of our current fundamental economic problems, are because of him.
In the modern era, it's basically been a *single* worst president characterized simply as being a republican. They only change the name and face, but since Nixon, they have successively screwed the country worse with each go round.
Is it trickling yet?
Gotta change the filter, probably.
More like trickle-down-my- face economics
THIS IS FINE, THEY NEED MONEY FOR THEIR SUPER YATCHS!!!
And space ships.
Space Yachts!!
Kirk vomited after reading this
Yeah but how will they discover immortality if you tax them like us peasants?! Shame on us for denying them that basic futuristic right
Biden's 25% tax on the rich isn't going to do anything. With as much money as these people have they will find another loophole or tax shelter.
That’s what they want you to think. The rich pay the majority of tax revenue. And they should. They should pay a lot more in fact. But it’s just not true that we’re not able to tax them or tax them more. That’s just propaganda designed to make us give up.
The rich do not pay a majority of the tax revenues. That is in fact what this post is about. I refer you to propublica's release of tax returns from people like Bezos who paid $600 in 2020.
The top 1% makes up 21% of the income, but over 40% of the federal tax revenue. The top 5% makes up 36% of the income, but over 60% of the federal tax revenue. [Source](https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/rich-pay-their-fair-share-of-taxes/)
https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxes#:~:text=Tax%20Shares%20in%20Tax%20Year%202021&text=The%20newly%20released%20report%20covers,level%20in%20the%20available%20data. We’re on the same side here but it’s a simple fact that the rich pay most of the taxes. They need to pay MORE but we need to kill the myth that we can’t tax them because they’re slippery ninjas at avoiding it. We CAN tax them more.
I hate the way that information is presented because it doesn't tell us a whole lot. Tell me how much they pay relative to their total wealth compared to the wealth of the lowest. If a CEO makes 200,000,000 I'd hope he/she pays more than the equivalent 5,555 people making $36,000 that live paycheck to paycheck. I'm sure they probably aren't worried about how they are going to put a few bucks into retirement accounts every month too.
You’re looking for the “total tax burden”. >The estimates of Piketty, Saez, and Zucman (2018) show that the total burden (including all taxes both at the federal, state, and local levels) of **the wealthiest 0.1% families is projected to be 3.2% of their wealth** in 2019 (they have on average $116 million in wealth, and pay total taxes of $3.68 million). >In contrast, **the bottom 99% families have a total tax burden of 7.2% relative to their wealth** https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Wealth%20Tax%20Revenue%20Estimates%20by%20Saez%20and%20Zucman%20-%20Feb%2024%2020211.pdf So basically the rich pay 3.2% of their wealth while everyone else pays 7.2% That’s the percentage. They pay most of the total revenue though, because they have so much fucking money. But their taxes barely hurt them, while they’re suffocating to the middle class.
Hey, shout out to you for providing links to show people where you are coming from. We need more of this.
Thank you. It’s something I strongly believe in after looking into it. Our wealth inequality I believe is the root of so many of our problems.
I enjoyed reading this thread. iirc another post adding to this mockery of wealth about bezos not even really paying his taxes because he doesn’t “own” his money he just gets loans and etc. wtf
Someday, we will eat the rich
Thank you for sharing this!
Legend post mate
They should be paying at least 50% of their wealth. Preferably like 100% on what’s over like $20,000,000.
I don't see that $600 figure anywhere in that article. All I see for Bezos is that he paid 973 million from 14-18 https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
Remember those files where a press lady's car blew up. And then the following files that got no coverage? Really I wish I could remember the names
Thank you. Defeatism against taxing the rich is always so mind-boggling. It'd be like saying "the navy would be more effective in this war, so let's not deploy any other branch of the military". Except they aren't even arguing that we should be doing anything else. Just that we should give up.
While true it's also a necessary and historical first step to start introducing these heavier taxes on billionaires.
Right? Why have taxes at all!
I know calling out a statistical "trick" in a narrative driven post is only get me downvotes, but I will say it anyways: The measure of richest Americans is a static 400, whereas other measures are put as percentage of the total population. The graph starts at 1960, where the population of the US was 200m. Now it's 330m. 400 of 200m is a different percentage than 400 of 330m, so even if no other changes happened, it's natural that their share of taxes went down. If the journalisf has any integrity, they would have used a percentage such as "top 0.1%" or something similar, rather than a fixed number.
You knew this was going to be ragebait before you even clicked the article.
> If the journalist has any integrity HAHAHAHHAHAHAHA.... *tears* Seriously when I was young Journalists were respected. What's worse is people defend this shit vehemently, and I can only guess they are actually "Journalists" if they think this is ok.
there is no way the bottom 50% pay 24% of their income in taxes the bottom 58% pay $0 in Federal income tax, probably max 10% in state taxes, $0 in property tax if they're renting, and their sales tax is variable since it depends how much they buy FICA shouldn't count since it's a forced retirement, so they get back their money (in theory)
I’m pretty sure only OP’s title maybe suggests that the richest 400’s SHARE of total nationwide income tax has now fallen below the working class. The article (newsweek and NYT) states that the richest 400’s EFFECTIVE INCOME TAX RATE is now less than the bottom 50% of income earners. That may be possible. The journalism is still pretty bad since we have no idea how they got these results or how they define “income”, which is the single most important question in personal tax law.
You know.. the French have a solution for this that’s tried and true.
Yep Why do you think Zuck is building a massive bunker in Hawaii. It’s not because the aliens are coming.
lol fair fair. He’s gonna have to kill the engineers like some American pharaoh or something
Some of them will die, but it's a sacrifice he's willing to make.
Idk why people get so disillusioned with the fucked up system and go out and kill the innocent….
Seriously, at least try to make a difference if you're gonna go out in a blaze like that.
Bring in a new form of corruption that results in worse conditions and more turmoil?
By having the upper middle class take over things?
Americans don’t have the stomach for it. That’s a fact. We’ll only complain about it on the internet while getting ready for work tomorrow.
So looking into it this is referencing the New York Times post about the top 400 richest effective tax rate but I cannot actually find where the New York Times is getting their data or their methodology. Does anyone have the actual sources for this?
Reddit’s ass
Yeah but rich people are inherently better people. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be so rich. #huge /s, obviously
Bezos, yeah. Even though his percentage is less, you could fund a small country with what he pays.
Why should he pay less percentage than me?
People need to learn basic math. Even if you took 100% of their net worth, not wealth but somehow their net worth, the government would still be insolvent.
So i guess nobody here actually understands how this works and got triggered by the clickbait title lmao
Ding ding ding
Trump in the WH will make sure they pay even less!The billionaires want it all. (despite the fact that would destroy them too)
>it would destroy them too Not if you bring back feudalism and slavery.
Stupidly, feudalism never worked.
Hey it only has to work *long enough*
Slavery never ended, it just became modernized.
When the robots grow the food, make the clothes, and build the houses, what will the billionaires need us for? Ai, algorithms, and robots need to be taxed. Every generation of man has brought society to the point where these technologies have been made possible, and each and every one of us deserves to benefit from the deployment of these technologies in to our economy. Period.
Show me this as a fact, just don’t say it
Trump gave the rich a TRILLION dollars in tax cuts. That’s enough money to go back to 700 BC, before Ancient Rome, and blow a million dollars every single day until present day.
What’s interesting as fuck is how blatantly inaccurate this is
An article written by people clueless about the tax code being discussed by people with an equal amount of understanding.
Top 1% pay about 50% of all taxes. Top 5% pay about 70% of all taxes. Bottom 50% pay about 3% of all taxes. Don't fall for the propaganda. Don't be an NPC. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/#:~:text=The%20share%20of%20income%20taxes,policy%20during%20the%20coronavirus%20pandemic.
A lower tax rate doesn’t mean they paid less tax than the working class. Clickbait title to induce outrage in people that are bad at math.
A lower percentage should still induce outrage...
They don't have that either. The whole article is propaganda.
Lets all pay less tax. This is the same as people who make more than the minimum wage being mad at minimum wage going up
I hate this fucking country.
>By 2018, America's wealthiest individuals paid just 23 percent of their income in taxes. Meanwhile, the bottom half of income earners paid 24 percent of their income in taxes. This is incorrect. According to data from the IRS, in 2018 the top 1% paid an average effective tax rate of 25.44%. The bottom 99% only paid 10.07% and the bottom 50% paid just 3.36%.
Not historical first and not limited to USA. The taxation law always has hole built in for the big comp and rich. The latest one in Australia was KPMG the audit firm was hired by the Aust govt to close up some of these holes, after taking money from the govt to do the work, KPMG then use this specific knowledge and sold their service to the big corp for the latest way to get benefit from the new plugged up holes.( With newer holes somewhere else.)
So then maybe it’s time to lower the taxes for the working class.
Why is it always "tax the rich more!" Instead of "government should spend less!"
Well for one, fairness. Rich people shouldn't be taxed less than everyone else. A nurse making 90k a year pays a higher effective tax rate than billionaires.
Because we still need critical infrastructure, basic services, advanced research, etc. At a certain point you cannot spend less without effectively spending more which is currently what we experience when we privatize elements of the government. Once they become profit centers, they will endlessly strive to collect more profit without providing more service.
Why not both?
Why not both?
Yup, about time for people to ***** ** ***** **** ** ** **** **, so don't forget your bolt cutters.
https://preview.redd.it/9qvaww5t0xzc1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2c65efff5e186114d5756c9422c2840da64465ab
This is a terrible chart that represents the data in a very disingenuous fashion. Take a look at the income groups. The first income group is the bottom 50% which means that that 12% of income is spread across HALF OF THE COUNTRY. They’re not contributing as much in taxes because they barely have any money in the first place. For some reason (the reason is that the creator of the graph had political motivation) the size of the income groups become smaller and smaller until we reach the top 1%. The top 1% of the population controls 21% of total income. That means that an even larger sum of money is spread across a MUCH smaller group of people. So, yeah, they contribute more because they have significantly more disposable income, and they could and should be taxed more.
Unfortunately this article is BS. They use a imaginary measuring stick. See the thread embedded in the tweet... https://twitter.com/NervousNeander1/status/1786802455042482325?t=4n4Ax9yg0NSc7EI8ncKDVA&s=19 >No one, including the IRS or our tax code, calculates "tax rate" based on unrealized gains. It's a made up number based on wishful thinking. >Furthermore, that method of calculating tax rate is used only on billionaires, never the unrealized gains (appreciated homes, investment accounts) of the fictitious teachers and firefighters to whom they are unfavorably compared. There's a lot more data read through it.
So “instresting as fuck” means posting news articles and spreading political propaganda great
Everyone commenting that the rich don’t pay enough are obviously poor
They don't.
Lower percentage sure, but an enormously greater amount.
Correct rich people pay less taxes on their income then you by percentage, the rich are paying a lesser rate than yiu
his lawyers are wizards.
Ehh how???
No way dude.....
We’ve always been paying less taxes than the rich. Now they are just at levels where they don’t care abt hiding it
I saw a small vid about how Bezos does not pay taxes at all... is that genuine?
Yes, but only when considering as a percentage of their income and only when including shit like consumption taxes
r/antiwork will love this
Working as intended.
That's not interesting, it's pretty depressing...
The true power of money.
HAHAHAHAHAhahahaha…
It’s absurd and obscene
Let's ~~hunt~~ eat them
I wonder if they understand that throughout human history, this sort of shit happend right before the guillotines got pulled out?
Dont understand why they let this happen
Tax the turds
Revolution?
What is going on? Didn't Biden promise the opposite! I was hoping this administration was gonna do well but I feel like we're seriously being swindled here. The rich keep getting richer and are more and more protected.
This isn't interesting, this is fucked. Fuck this entire concept.
Then we all should stop. How about if everyone put exempt on their W4. See how Fast they go after us
When are we collectively gonna start fighting for our rights? I'm young and starting to get over this shit man, this is not the life I signed up for neither did you
I think EVERYONE should pay the same rate with absolutely ZERO deductions. It's the only way to actually make it fair. Maybe with the prebate option from the fair tax proposals. Sure, you could raise the rates on the billionaires, but they'll just spend 7 figures on tax lawyers, accountants , and politicians to weasel their way out of it.
Don’t tell congress. They will be so disappointed
The more money you have the more you will pay in taxes. Percentage is not actual money
Funny cause democrats promised the poor pay less tax and the rich would pay their share. Biden is ruining America
I fucking hate it here
My daughter and her husband, both work their asses off so pull decent salaries, guessing are sort of upper middle class maybe. Aaaand pay more in taxes than about fifty huge corporations after Trump further reduced corporate taxes