Dvergar wrote:
The top 10% pay about 70% of the government's income in a year. They also own about 70% of all wealth, so that's pretty much spot on. The bottom 40% of Americans own less than 1% of the wealth. Keep crying about those taxes and how hard you have it.
I hope you didn't rupture anything pulling those numbers out of your ass.
You're making the mistake of conflating income and wealth, which are two different things. I'm still trying to wrap my head around intelligent people not being able to discern the difference between the two.
While the federal government does track income (for tax purposes if nothing else), I can't find any evidence that it tracks wealth, which leads me to question how you come to the assertion that a group of taxpayers "owns 70% of all wealth." I'm also not sure where you're grabbing numbers for a "bottom 40%," since all the breakdowns I've managed to find chart the following:
Top 1%
Top 5%
Top 10%
Top 25%
Top 50%
Bottom 50%
The most recent numbers I've been able to find come from 2008, when the Bottom 50% paid 2.7% of all taxes.
I've only managed to find one comparison of how the percentage of overall income compares to the percentage of overall taxes paid, and those numbers are from 2000:
Income--------Taxable---------Percent of----------Percent of Total
Percentile------Income-------Total US Income-----Income taxes paid
Top 1%--------$313,469------20.81%-----------37.42%
Top 5%--------$128,336------35.30%-----------56.47%
Top 10%-------$92,144-------46.01%-----------67.33%
Top 25%-------$55,225-------67.15%-----------84.01%
Top 50%-------$27,682-------87.01%-----------96.09%
Extending from those numbers it appears that the Bottom 50% earned 12.99% of Total US Income but only paid 3.91% of all taxes.
Looking at those numbers not only do we see how the tax burden is disproportionately distributed, but we can also see that the disparity is growing since the Bottom 50% saw their percentage of taxes paid shrink from 3.91% in 2000 to 2.7% in 2008.
But I guess that those groups in the Top 50% paying anywhere from 16.61% to 21.7% more in taxes than they represent in income somehow represents how "The Rich" are taking advantage of the system, amirite?
This sort of imbalance doesn't encourage a lot Americans to feel like they have a stake in the decision about whether a form of government spending is worth the cost. The longer this imbalance exists, the more it suggests to many that the cost can be put on someone else, making it less likely that citizens are going to let their politicians know what they really care about versus what they just think is nice if it's 'free.'
Your Pal,
Jubber
