How much higher do you think that number should be?
Despite have marginal rates >70%, very few people ever paid them.
Sort-of. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2017/08/07/the_history_o...
For a less partisan source, with a neat "pick your income" chart that illustrates the flaws in the Mises argument for sky-high incomes (try anything over ~$500k/year), https://qz.com/74271/income-tax-rates-since-1913/
$15 per hour for a teenager to sweep floors — now that’s being overpaid.
If you think you are undertaxed, there is a solution: https://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm
In 2018, just over $700,000 has been donated. So clearly all of us “overpaid” people don’t really care.
I pay taxes for public transit I don’t use, public schools my kids don’t attend, healthcare I don’t consume, wars I didn’t ask for, bridges in places I’ll never go. I subsidize food for people I’ll never meet, housing, universal service fees; I pay sales taxes on everything, excise taxes created to pay for a war almost 100 years before I was born, subsidies to farmers, oil, green energy — we pay for all of this stuff. I am on with paying taxes, but dammit, I pay enough already. Over half of everything I earn goes to pay for government. I even had to pay US taxes when I didn’t even live in the US.
I understand taxes are necessary; but it’s not fair that I work 1 day for the government for every 1 day I work for myself. It doesn’t matter how much I get paid, what matters is that half of everything I do goes to taxes.
I worked very hard to get to where I am — that ought not result in being punished for it.
I consume just as much “government” as the guy standing next to me; why should I have to pay more than him?
The Fed’s debt is made up of (other) Treasury bills which it purchased during QE using “printed” money.
If this makes your head spin, then you’ve probably understood it correctly.
> The interest that the Fed collects on its investments is paid by the federal government, and then returned to the government. But this wash cycle still saves money because those interest payments would otherwise be made to the outside investors who would have purchased the bonds.
> “It’s interest that the Treasury didn’t have to pay to the Chinese,” Ben S. Bernanke, then the Fed’s chairman, told Congress back in 2011, when the annual windfalls were still new and surprising.