I don't quite know the best way to measure it instead, but isn't saying the top 1% of PEOPLE pay 26% a pretty misleading statistic? I have no idea if it is too high. The 1% is a fixed number of people, how rich are they? If they have 99% percent of the wealth then 26% is too low. If they have 1% of the wealth 26% is too high. It also can grow if you lower their tax rate, if they get enough richer they might pay 27% even if you lowered their rates. It feels like we should be saying X% of wealth pays Y% of taxes, I think I could at least have an opinion about that number that has some meaning.
Oh, this is knowable, a quick search says the top 1% owns 32% of the wealth (I know this isn't income, so not perfect) but given that I'm going to say I think 26% is either fine or too low.
Based on a reported $820k mean income for the top 1% of earners vs something like 47k for everyone else (US figures), it'd be about 15% of total income being earned by the top 1%, which is lower than I would've thought.
Those numbers are just a few clicks away. I'm not defending them by the way, I'm myself just a regular employee.
Between a communist utopia and an unregulated greedy-driven capitalism nation, here is what we got, not optimal but works better than average. Neither big corps are evil nor poor people are lazy will be able to fix the problems. There is still hope if you keep working hard to fulfill your dreams in US, the worst is doing nothing and blaming all the faults to the system, the big companies, the rich, the COVID...it will make things worse.
be it a private business or a public one, it typically is owned by a (large) group of shareholders, who put their hard earned money including retirement savings into those evil companies and just trying to get a better return than CDs in the bank after they spent (lots of) time to study about the market, or spent money to hire specialists. And yes there are lots of risks associated with that move, many of them lost money in the end.
These evil corps are not Satan sitting somewhere in the darkness counting for the money they just stole, they're just a proxy for tens of millions of ordinary people to invest like you and me.
yes some individuals are earning way more than the rest, they're typically taxed half of that away in the end, maybe they should be taxed more. The fact is still, about 50% never pay federal tax, and the top 1% earner paid 26% of all the taxes, how far can that go?
I'm a regular worker and I lost investment in those evil big guns all the time, I just never understand why people blame the 'evil corps' for all the troubles while those people might have bought quite a lot stocks investing in those evil entities themselves, it looks me to you're cursing yourself.