And what is the right share that the wealthy should pay, and how wealthy should one be to be paying that amount? I'm assuming it's some level of wealth above yours.
About half of the US doesn't pay any federal income tax, and a little over a quarter pays no net federal taxes at all, including payroll taxes. The labor force participation rate hit its peak in the 90s and has been steadily decreasing since then, with the last reading at 62.1%. Perhaps you should ask why three-fifths of adults aren't doing their share of the labor?
Careful that you don't cut yourself with all those edgy takes.
Otherwise, I ask that you keep empty comments out of the forum.
How is that not paying their share?
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Particularly since you carefully ignore that income is typically small fraction of the wealth of the 1%, most of which is capital and which largely escapes taxation.
Capital gains tax is a thing, and in most cases that capital is taxed multiple times through its "lifecycle". The reason capital gains are taxed at a lower rate is because we want to encourage capital investment. It's what makes things. Food. Jobs.
You're also following a flawed premise (many people do this) that wealth is a finite pool, or a zero-sum game.
It isn't.
There's no upper bound to wealth creation. It's not a limited pool. It's unlimited.
Wealth is created when a person, or group of people, create a product or service that other people desire. That's it. Anyone can do it, and successful people do - through a combination of work, opportunity identification and luck.
The ideology I see behind "wealth inequality" in the U.S. typically boils down to some derivative of envy.
The solution to "wealth inequality" isn't taxation - that only has the power to destroy.
The solution is individual, different for each person, their life goals and what sorts of things are important to them, but rests in creation and innovation.
That's what's created wealth through human history, and it's what will continue to do so, if we allow it.
Taxing others and giving it away is lots of fun until you run out of people to tax, and you've managed to disincentivize and destroy what wealth remains.
Take a look at Prodrazvyorstka [1] to see how that works out.
It's the "top 1 percent of taxpayers". So the people who paid the most taxes, paid the most taxes. They also made 20% of the total income. Or roughly 2 trillion dollars.
So if you managed to make a lot of money but also managed to avoid paying taxes on that money, you would not be included in "the top 1 percent of taxpayers".
The bottom 50% of taxpayers only made 11.1% of the income.
And that's the problem with all of this, there are ways to slice the data to try and gloss over the very real problem of wealth inequality we have right now.
And nobody pays for anything with inflation. That's not how inflation works.