This person is ultra high income if their marginal tax rates are 50%. They didnt give numbers but using an online calculator [0] and assuming a high tax state (CA), you need to be above $500k a year income to hit 50% marginal rates. That is also assuming you are single, a married person would need a combined income nearly twice that to hit 50%.

[0] https://smartasset.com/taxes/income-taxes

Nobody who claims this ever gives concrete numbers.

How much do you think we could reduce taxes on middle and upper middle earners by increasing taxes on the ultra-rich?

I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I thought I had a reasonable strategy to simply calculate it. I can't do it for America, because I'm not sufficiently familiar with what data you have available and am instead going to do the analysis for Sweden.

In Sweden the labour share of GDP is 55%, however taxes on wages are 60% of the total government income, and a large remaining fraction of the taxes on work income. Another 30% is from VAT. Let's assume arbitrarily that half the VAT is paid by workers and not with income from capital.

Under this assumption, workers receive 55% of GDP in compensation before taxes, but pay 70% of all taxes.

If taxes on income were the same for workers as for capital then workers would pay 55% instead of 70%, so taxes would be 18% lower than they are now.

Its difficult to define terms like ultra rich and middle income earner, but my guess is that if you increased the top marginal tax rates such that rate on the "ultra rich" was something like 70% (including capital gains, etc), you could completely eliminate taxes for the bottom 50%.

The top 1% earners earned 21% of all U.S. income while paying 40% of all federal income taxes [0]. I would guess going from 50% to 70% would increase that share to would increase that percentage to 58%.

[0]: https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...

Old comment here, but I was assuming not just income tax to increase, but also to have capital gains, dividends, etc to be taxed at 70%. Current cap there is 20%, per my understanding, and a substantial amount of wealthy person's income is taxed at these favorable rates.

Can you show how you calculated that?

There was no such thing as income taxes until world war 1. So taxes increased ridiculously for 50 years and have been decreasing, as it should, ever since. I believe in paying taxes but not to my own detriment. I pay more than my fair share.

> There was no such thing as income taxes until world war 1

Federal income tax goes back at least as far as 1861: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revenue_Act_of_1861