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Originally Posted by Animus  I see what you are saying but then again the top 2% tax bracket pays something like 90% of all taxes country wide. |
I think it's more like the top 1% pay something like 30%. The top 5% pay something like 50%.
But, and it's a huge but, that top 1% brings in something like 15% of all income in the country. Think abut that. There are about 300 million people. About a million households take 15% of all income. So the other 290 million get the remaining 85%. That's an insanely disproportionate amount of the country's income to be going to such a small number of people.
They SHOULD be paying that much tax. I think most of us can get comfortable with the fact that someone can work hard and manage to do really well and start a company that creates a good product, and end up with tens of millions (in the bank, not income every year.) I don't think someone like that should be taxed at a rate too far above the average. But when 1% of families are getting a full 15% of all the income brought in, that's getting into an unhealthy dynastic type of situation, the sort that will inevitably grow and eventually will cause some sort of major political fallout. It's that kind of accumulation of wealth at the top that is the cause of socialist revolution.
Is it 'fair'? No, but when it comes to fair vs. a healthy society, and the type of 'unfairness' we are talking about is that your $100M yearly income is being taxed at 50% or some such thing, that's a kind of unfairness that most of us would like to be subject to. If you can't make it on $50M a year, so that the rest can go back to benefit the society that you are benefiting so massively off of, then I'm having trouble feeling sorry for you.