Every year the IRS publishes a detailed report on the taxes it collects. And the statistics are REALLY interesting.
A few weeks ago the agency released its most recent report. So this is the most objective, up-to-date information that exists about taxes in America.
This is important, because, these days, it’s common to hear progressive politicians and woke mobsters calling for higher income earners and wealthier Americans to pay their “fair share” of taxes.
But this report, directly from the US agency whose job it is to tax Americans, shows the truth:
The top 1% of US taxpayers paid 48% of total US income taxes.
And that’s just at the federal level, not even counting how much of the the local and state taxes the wealthy paid.
Further, the top 10% paid nearly 72% of total income taxes.
Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of US income tax filers paid no net income tax at all. And the next group, those making between $30-$50,000 per year, paid an effective rate of just 1.9%.
(Again, this is not some wild conspiracy theory; these numbers are directly from IRS data.)
But the fact that 10% of the taxpayers foot nearly three-fourths of the tax bill still isn’t enough for the progressive mob. They want even more.
The guy who shakes hands with thin air, for example, recently announced that he wants to introduce a new law that would create a minimum tax of 25% on the highest income earners.
But the government’s own statistics show that the highest income earners in America— those earning more than $10 million annually— paid an average tax rate of 25.5%. That’s higher than Mr. Biden’s 25% minimum.
So he is essentially proposing an unnecessary solution in search of a problem.
I bring this up because whenever you hear the leftist Bolsheviks in government and media talking about “fair share”, they always leave out what exactly the “fair share” is.
The top 1% already pay nearly half the taxes. Exactly how much more will be enough?
Should the top 1% pay 60% of all taxes? 80%? At what point will it be enough?
They never say. They’ll never commit to a number. They just keep expanding their thinking scope.
Elizabeth Warren, for example, quite famously stopped talking about the “top 1%” and started whining about the “top 5%”. And then the “top 10%”.
She has already decided that the top 5% of wealthy households should not be eligible for student loan forgiveness or Medicare.
And when she talks about “accountable capitalism” on her website, Warren calls out the top 10% for having too much wealth, compared to the rest of households.
Soon enough it will be the “top 25%” who are the real problem…
Honestly this whole way of thinking reminds me of Anthony “the Science” Fauci’s pandemic logic on lockdowns and mask mandates.
You probably remember how reporters always asked “the Science” when life could go back to normal… and he always replied that it was a function of vaccine uptake, i.e. whenever enough Americans were vaccinated.
But then he kept moving the goal posts. 50%. 60%. 70%. It was never enough. And there was never a concrete answer.
This same logic applies to what the “experts” believe is the “fair share” of taxes which the top whatever percent should pay.
They’ll never actually say what the fair share is. But my guess is that they won’t stop until 100% of taxes are paid by the top 10% … and the other 100% of taxes are paid by the other 90%.