Re:Top 20% pay 95% of taxes
by AznHisoka on Friday October 27, 2017 @10:06AM
(#15568362)
If you include capital gains tax, I'd venture that it'll be even more than 95%.
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You would be quite wrong. If you count all taxes, rather than cherry-picking the most progressive ones, the top 20% pays about 2/3rds of all taxes. They also earn about 2/3rds of all income. The total tax rate in terms of all tax paid divided by income earned is remarkably flat: the bottom 20% has an effective rate of about 20%, and the top 1% has an effective rate of about 34%.
Capital gains is taxed well below the normal tax rate so it really does not add up to as much as you might think. "As a share of total federal revenue from all sources, capital gains taxes averaged about 4.2 percent from 1995 through 2009." https://pocketsense.com/percent-irs-revenue-comes-capital-ga...
Further, it's skipped when someone inherits money making death a massive tax break.
PS: 34% of federal revenue comes from payroll taxes which are very regressive, 47% from income taxes which include capital gains which are progressive. Net result a surprisingly flat effective tax rate.