Who is Paying Taxes?

As a statistician, I must say your suggestions are silly. Income taxes are not levied based on a linear percentage of income, meaning the pie chart you are requesting would be misinformative. Plotting it in a time series (presumably over years) will only serve to magnify this and many other auto-correlated errors. Adjustments for inflation afflict all wage earners at the same rate.

As a percentage of total wealth? OK. I see now. So the people who save money for things like a home, college for children and retirement should be punished! Yes take that money from them immediately! Give it to all of those poor downtrodden who spend their money on alcohol, drugs, designer label cloths and every stupid consumer product that they can run up on their credit card. YES! YES! YES! THIS IS AMERICA! Also make sure you give that money you collect to people who are not citizens. People who routinely lie, cheat and steal from our system through social security fraud, welfare fraud and tax fraud. People who come here with a load of kids (every relative’s that they have) call them their own kids, don’t pay any school taxes and use all of the resources (including free lunches) of our best elementary and secondary school systems. Make sure you give these same kids grants for free college educations and then swing the door of America wide open to let them go back to their original country to sell those same goods to those same people who continue to spend the money that they don’t have to buy those goods so that those people we gave a free ride to can eventually own America.

Beautiful plan Chris. Guess what Bro? As one of those guys at the $500K+ who paid over $250K in taxes last year, WE’RE LEAVING. If that is the way it is going to work in the future, we will take our companies and move to a place that doesn’t penalize the people who worked their way up from nothing. The people who always paid their own way and their kids way. The people that funded Medicare, Social Security, Bosnia, Iraq (both times) Afghanistan, Somalia and every other hair brained government screw-up.

Happy Thanksgiving Chris. It’s up to YOU now. Be thankful that you had us for this long. With great ideas like you have I’m sure it will all work out for you.

I guess the chart is showing that >$75,000 a year makes you rich because they are a big part of the income taxes paid.

The people who get hurt the most by high taxes are the ones who make $100,000-$1 million a year. Most of them don’t have a lot of wealth generally speaking and have to work 9-5 like the rest of us, but have to pay a much bigger share and the taxes they pay make a big dent in their wealth. They can’t retire for quite some time either just like you an me.

It sounds silly to say that but it is true. This group is often small business owners who have worked hard to be successful and get slammed for their success. Not only that, often their income can vary greatly. They aren’t sure if their business will be profitable or even operational in a few years.

In any case, grouping a guy who makes $350K a year with a guy who makes $10 million into the same tax bracket is absurd… Those two guys live completely different lifestyle, with the former probably living like the rest of us…

Those who make tens of millions a year or more aren’t affected nearly as much.

Yeah we can say oh poor guy he only makes $350K but in many parts of the country that isn’t a lot and that kind of money is in no way rich…

I’m sure most of the “rich” would gladly trade a 33% reduction in income tax paid for a 100% increase in all other combined taxes paid.

Our socialist approach to education has bureaucrats making pathetic “standards” of required knowledge. Because these standards are enforced upon all students, private schools are forced to alter their subject matter to compete. Thus, freedom of speech in education is destroyed along with free competition among schools. No, nobody can put their kids through a decent education.

If the usefulness of wealth is logarithmic, then doesn’t that make any claims of “income disparity” complete b.s.? We keep seeing hysterical claims that there is a “widening wealth gap”, but that is always measured in *linear* dollars, not logarithmic dollars. In fact, though, the lifestyle of someone making, say, 1M a year really isn’t much different than that of someone making 100K a year: sure, they can buy bigger TVs, but the guy making 100K has TV technology that even the richest person didn’t have, oh, 10 years ago; sure, the 1M guy can stay in 5-star resorts that cost 10X as much as a more modest place, but the 100K guy is taking vacations that couldn’t have been dreamed about 50 years ago, etc.

If you’re going to play these games, you have to play them both ways.

Well, what do you mean? If you didn’t tax the rich more, you could either A) just steal it from the rich, since 99% of the people can surely overpower 1%, or more constructively B) reduce government spending.

The point of the graphic is that A is exactly what *is* happening: 99% of the people are stealing from the other 1%. There’s no other justification or explanation, and it’s a natural outcome of “majority rules” system if the income distribution is such that the distribution of incomes is higher at the lower ends: the majority at the lower end are going to vote to steal money from the minority at the upper end.

But the whole problem goes away if we take a little personal responsibility for our lives and stop asking others – via the government – to make our lives better for us.

I finally got a high paying job a while back and quit, because I was working much harder and risking bodily harm to come out barley ahead of when I slacked off. It’s stupid. Lets penalize someone who works hard.

Actually that “Jefferson quote” about democracy ceasing is fake. He did write a comment once that was in some ways similar.

http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_democracy_will_cease_to_exist

But Jefferson wrote many more comments specifically about taxation in the United States under the freshly inked Constitution…

“Many of the opposition [to the new Federal Constitution] wish to
take from Congress the power of internal taxation. Calculation
has convinced me that this would be very mischievous.” –Thomas
Jefferson to William Carmichael, 1788.

“Taxes should be proportioned to what may be annually spared by
the individual.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1784.

“Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is
to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the
higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they
rise.” –Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1785.

“The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the
whole taxes of the General Government are levied… Our revenues
liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus
applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see
his government supported, his children educated, and the face of
his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich
alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his
earnings.” –Thomas Jefferson to Thaddeus Kosciusko, 1811.

“Excessive taxation… will carry reason and reflection to every
man’s door, and particularly in the hour of election.” –Thomas
Jefferson to John Taylor, 1798.

So educated people are worthless because they don’t have as much money as you. Those employees wouldn’t have the educations you use to make your money without your taxes.

If you are making all of the money you are going to have to pay most of the taxes. Stop being such a prima-donna victim and pay your dues you ungrateful tool.

uh, make that comments above.

A flat tax, geared solely to enrich the haves even more. The government needs those war dollars! Let the rich pay more — they’re the one profiting.

Even the flat tax is theft. When you go the store to buy milk, they don’t charge you based on your income; a gallon of milk is a gallon of milk. When you have a restaurant cook food for you, they don’t ask for your income level, everyone pays the same for the same service. Our government provides services to people (”it is a government… *for* the people”); pricing should be based on a per-service basis. Take away the subsidies that try to keep the post office competitive with private industry, and the post office is actually a government entity that gets it right: you pay for a *stamp*, you don’t have to show your income level first and pay a percentage of your income for the stamp.

Run the government like any other service provider: you want something for the government, you pay for it. For some services, that’s going to be the same fee for everyone. For some services – let’s say the government mowed lawns, say – the “rich” would pay more, presuming they have larger lawns. More realistically, for the somewhat legitimate functions of government – national defense and police, that is, protection of property – there’s certainly an argument to be made that that service should be paid for based on how much, exactly, the government is protection, just as private security firms charge more to wire up a mansion than my two-room shack. But that certainly isn’t *income*; some people with big houses have no income (they don’t work, say), and others with lots of income do not have big houses (they save their money, say). *Income* is a private transaction between an employer and an employee and even forcing people to disclose their income is an undemocratic violation of privacy.

The last step is to open up all of the areas that government currently provides to competition. The government can run schools, sure, but they have to run them *from money they earn from the people who pay fees to go to them*, not by stealing money. They might do very well, but if they do so, it will be because they have innovated and learned to provide a better product for the money than their private competitors.

And how lucky they got. Success requires hard work and LUCK. Hard work and sacrifice don’t guarantee success. They are merely required.

Crying how people who make substantially less than you pay substantially less than you is the definition of childish.

If it wasn’t the working class in this country, the Walton family and others wouldn’t have their fortunes. Capital without labor power is dead. Oh, and it’s a myth that the rich got where they are by hard work. That’s a load of crap, because there are many more people moving horizontally through their life.