I don't know what the statistic for this was 50 years ago, but today 38% of federal income tax revenues come from the 1%.

And the top 1% earn 2x as much of the income as they did 50 years ago, but don't pay 2x more of the share of income tax.

Meaning that income tax is less progressive now.

Also the 38% number that right wing groups like to throw around is very carefully crafted to avoid FICA taxes, which account for a much larger percentage of the tax burden for lower income earners. And the social security component goes away after the first $130k in income.

If you express FICA in terms of benefits received / contributions paid, it is quite progressive.

If you're only considering direct first order benefits then nearly all taxes are quite progressive. Even a flat 10% income tax would be progressive using that model because people's direct consumption of government services doesn't scale linearly with income. The only way to have a non-progressive tax was to charge everyone a flat rate.

"Why should I have have to pay a penny more in taxes than that teacher over there. It's not like I'm consuming more units of military protection than they are."

Hopefully you can see the problem with that.

Maybe it should be more like 50% because doesn't the 1% have 50% of all assets?

Maybe, but if you eliminate the 1%, then who is going to pay that 38%?

Taxing the 1% more heavily isn't really the same thing as eliminating the 1% though is it? And taxing wealth over a certain limit, which is what the person you were replying to is probably getting at, solves your problem taxing income preventing people from becoming wealthy in the first place.

> Taxing the 1% more heavily isn't really the same thing as eliminating the 1% though is it?

Bernie Sanders has stated he wants to tax billionaires into non-billionaire status. So yes, it's about eliminating the 1%.

There are only about 600 billionaires in the US. The top 1% is over 3 million people. Also they'll still be in the top %0.01 with $999 million.

You're also making some weird assumptions that transferring money away from billionaires would just destroy that money, and that the current billionaires are using their resources in the most productive way possible. The real world isn't Atlas Shrugged.

Look up income velocity of money.

> You're also making some weird assumptions that transferring money away from billionaires would just destroy that money, and that the current billionaires are using their resources in the most productive way possible

There's nothing weird about that. You don't get to be a billionaire by being bad at managing your money, nor do you get to be a billionaire by investing in less productive investments.

By taxing the 1%, you are removing money from the most productive investments.

>You don't get to be a billionaire by being bad at managing your money, nor do you get to be a billionaire by investing in less productive investments.

Since close to half of America's billionaires inherited their fortunes, that's not really something you can prove. And that fact that it makes money doesn't necessarily mean it's beneficial to society, nor does it even mean it's the most economically productive possible use of resources.

>By taxing the 1%, you are removing money from the most productive investments.

Billionaires aren't the 1%. And "the most productive" investments isn't something you can prove or even make a semi-convincing argument for.

You're going to have a tough row to hoe convincing anyone that the people who make the most money from their investments aren't the best at productively investing money.

1. There's no way to prove that. We aren't a pure meritocracy. There's a huge element of luck to becoming a billionaire. So it's very likely that there are > 600 people out of the 330 million non billionaires who are at least as good or better at investing than the current billionaires.

2. Even if we do assume that the current billionaires are better at making money individually, there are still advantages to collective action. That is to say that taking 10% from the most individually productive members of society and building an interstate system likely produces more societal and economic benefit than whatever they would have done with the that money individually.