The wealth tax is aimed at the billionaire class.

That class paid less than the working class in taxes last year[1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...

As a rate - but not as what matters - actual money. I would expect wealthy to pay a smaller percentage. As an example - 1% of $1B = $10M. 30% of $40k = $12k.

They still pay more in actual dollars. Dollars are what people are after here.

using the effective rate is misleading because by absolute amounts they paid more.

> Near 50% of American pay ZERO tax whatsoever

The link you gave says that about 50% of Americans pay zero federal income tax. Are you trying to imply that the only tax in the US is the federal income tax?

Federal income tax brings about 2000 billions USD, US GDP is about 21000 billions USD, and all taxes/GDP is about 25% or about 5250 billions.

Or, in other words, you're overlooking about 2/3 of all taxes.

> Near 50% of American pay ZERO tax whatsoever.

As stated, that is completely and unequivocally false.

Near 50% of Americans pay no "Federal income tax" where "Federal income tax" is arbitrarily defined to not include payroll taxes despite them being a Federal tax on income. They still pay payroll taxes, state income tax, sales tax, etc.

The extreme case of this is France, where the "income tax" (90B€/year, progressive) is not the largest income tax. Rather, it is the "generalized social contribution" (124B€/year, flat rate). Of course, public discourse is focused on the income tax (50% of households don't pay any tax whatsoever!), not the main tax on income.

Semantics, I believe. The meta-point to be derived is that the top 10% pay a majority of all taxes in actual dollar value.

It's not just semantics. Federal income taxes aren't even half of all the taxes collected in the US.

This is just a political distorted stats view of the reality. It doesn’t help encourage discussion. You very well know that the wealthy pay a larger share because they own the larger share of the wealth. The 50% pay zero as you claim because those poor suckers don’t even own enough to qualify for the tax bracket.

It is not a political view of reality - it is an argument against the current reality. I'm suggesting subtly that we tax the person, not the wealth. That is only accomplished in one of two ways: Tax everyone the same, a high amount due to a costly government. Or lower the overhead cost of government and services until everyone can pay equally - as I believe it should be.

Also 3 people own more the those 50% of Americans[0]. I find it hard to believe 1 person is responsible for as much as 50 million people, and these 3 richest people leveraged other peoples labor to create this wealth. With Bezos as an example would he have anything at all with out the internet (created by DARPA) or the transportation infrastructure maintained by our tax dollars? What you are calling stealing is simply paying for services that made wealth creation possible.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/noahkirsch/2017/11/09/the-3-ric...

I'm not surprised by it, why would you? A few people in a generation have the spectacular combination of luck + 'wind behind their back' to accomplish more than millions of people I would suggest. How many people go through life accomplishing relatively little - holding themselves to subpar standards?

A thought example is Einstein, Feynman, Bohr compared to 'common folks' - same thing, different domain.

by taxing and providing more services we can provide " the spectacular combination of luck + 'wind behind their back' to accomplish more"