https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-for-the-top-1-skyrocketed-160...
"Percentage of taxes are paid by the top %1" is just one metric, but there's no reason why we should consider it the only criterion.
I would argue that in our world what you said might be true, and at the same time the bottom 90% lives their day to day with the threat that if they disobey their employer, their lives might quickly fall apart, and I would further argue that the latter is more telling about fairness in our society, than "top 1% pays more than bottom 90%"
The working poor though earn most their money through wages, which get taxed at the bare minimum 12.4% (payroll + post-payroll SS taxes), and then usually 7-10% sales tax because they are spending all they earn. So the poor are paying 20% tax right off the bat, meanwhile the rich are paying ~20% on capital gains but spending very little of that on sales tax and none on social security. So about the same overall tax rate paid on the earnings of the working poor as the rich.
Social security has always been the main monkey on the back of the working class, to the point the government will literally tax a childless person back into poverty to make sure the quasi-pyramid* scheme is funded. I don't think SS payments are normally recorded in the income tax statistics.
* but technically not
Median usual weekly real earnings: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Do do 'percentage of total wealth paid in taxes annually' for the bottom and the top groups.
But that's unfair because the bottom group barely has any wealth so the numbers will be skewed!
Wait a second..
I’d rather Romney hadn’t been driven by spite to chime correctly at 12 straight up on the stopped clock, but +1 advocate is still better than +0.
[0]: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/projections/tables/taxpayers...
For me, the much more concerning part of Social Security is the demographic challenge: the program started out with over 10 workers per retiree and is down to less than three[0]. It doesn't matter how you play with the sliding scales of who pays how much and what the earnings cap is, when in the end it's two to three working people's wages being taxed to support one retiree.
Even calling them "the 1%" is not particularly helpful, because 1% of America is still, like, three and a half million people. These are small business owners and the like; the kinds of people who are well off but still actually doing real productive work. Like, of course they pay the most taxes.
Once you start getting into the 1% of the 1% - "the 0.01%" - then you can afford to hire an accountant who can engineer you a favorable tax situation. And so your tax share starts falling.
But at the level of the 1% of the 0.01% - "the 0.0001%" - you can get custom-designed tax loopholes to favor you and you alone. Because at this level, you're talking about around 348 Americans, all with astronomically high wealth, paying almost no taxes. At this level, the amount of material wealth doesn't even matter; it's all bound up in hypotheticals and illiquid assets. Some of them might be CEOs, or interlocking directors, or politicians. But their real value is all in social capital - their connectedness to other 0.0001%ers who collectively own the economy and can move mountains in their favor.
There are multiple errors of omission in the above statement, I won't address all of them, but the easiest to understand (but unfortunately the least informative) is this:
Individual income taxes provide only 49% of all tax revenue, so you are arguing only about a minority portion of all federal tax revenue. Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%!
The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level.
That omission alone makes your statement look like an attempt to deceive by hiding half of the real numbers.
I don't think you can uncap social security without either blowing up the useful fiction that it is (mostly) mandatory old age insurance or uncapping the benefits. Maybe that fiction is going to expire soon anyway.
Yes, it is, but it's taxed far too low relative to its spending given the current healthcare cost structure. As a result, only half of the Medicare costs are funded by the Medicare Trust Fund, the other half is deficit funded.
In other words, unlike the Social Security tax, Medicare isn't self-funding from the Medicare tax because it's set artificially low (or healthcare costs are too high, if you prefer).
Also, after Congress raided the Social Security account, they made the point that Social Security is just another tax subject to spending in the general budget.
If that's the case, there are as many arguments for capping/uncapping the FICA taxes as for all other taxes. The problem with such arguments is their appeal to a notion of fairness which has as many faces as economics theories out there - basically a dead end - courtesy of our not-so-diligent economics "science".
So, it's better to use the achievement of better economic, political and social results as the only guidance for fiscal policy, although that requires a level of analysis which far exceeds what mainstream economics has to offer.
I'd ask you, and others reading my previous comment, to scratch this off as a bad choice of words on my part and replace it with:
"by moving to a pay-as-you-go policy for the SSTF, Congress made the point that Social Security is just another tax."
Previously I used "raiding" as a far-fetched metaphor for several different processes which are too complex to discuss here and it would distract from the main point: instead of complex itemization, SSFT & MCFT would be better off as parts of general taxation.
> AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
True in theory, but if we look at how surpluses are handled and how they depend on a manually controlled interest rate we'll see a different reality.
The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway.
> The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level.
You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?
It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs - this is a consequence of the regulatory fundamentals that have been in place for quite some time.
You'd be amazed how much fiscal policy can fix, even in the current messy state of other regulations.
> You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?
Not always and not at any level, it depends, the devil is in the details as usual.
I'm seeing no evidence that how much a nation taxes corporations affects its standard of living or political systems one way or another[0]. Norway and Cuba collect similarly high amounts (as a percentage of total tax receipts); the US rubs shoulders the likes of Spain, France, and Finland, as well as Cabo Verde and Tunisia in its relatively low collections.
[0]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/corporate-tax-statistic...
As far as I know there are quite a few loopholes to be exploited which don't trigger a taxable event, loans using assets as collateral is one of them but there are a bunch of other nice holes that creative and well paid accountants/lawyers find if you have enough money for their services.
That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not.
The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0]
The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1]
>> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0]
NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse
ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that.
[0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-1s-share-of-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/income-to-be-in-top-1-percen...
> That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
Is your reasoning that the amount of household wealth and income at each percentile should hold roughly constant over the years, as if this is some law of physics?
Seriously? Way to miss the point by miles
The point is: the absolute values are bad the direction and magnitude of change indicates it is getting worse.
The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%.
When the most wealthy society in the history of the planet still has large portions of its population living one missed paycheck or one illness/accident away from being destitute, or being already destitute, while a few at the top have orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, something is deeply wrong.
The change numbers show this already the case nearly four decades ago, it has gotten worse.
So yes, the glib argument that "the 1% already pay 90% of federal taxes..." is just as spurious as it is vacuous.
Not only does it ignore the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation, it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden, and the poor and middle classes pay vastly more of the other taxes such as sales tax, gasoline and road taxes, fees, etc. IOW, you are cherry-picking, and badly.
> the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation
How do you or anyone else know what's optimal and what's misallocated?
> it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden
Income tax is roughly half of federal receipts and is the single largest source, with payroll taxes the next largest at about a third.
Start with basic empathy and a simple sense of fairness.
No one here is saying everything should be even close to equal, and I certainly am not. But as many philosophers have pointed out through the ages, you can see how ethical a society is by how it treats its lowest members.
Seriously. Anyone who fails to see something is deeply wrong, when the most wealthy society in the history of the planet has half of it's people barely scraping by, while a tiny elite hoard orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, is morally blind.
So start there. When the system is producing this well-documented result, the wealthy are most definitely not paying enough taxes to support the society that enabled them to earn their wealth.
>>Income tax is roughly ...
Yes, and you are appearing to be deliberately obtuse by focusing only on specific federal taxes and ignoring the TOTAL tax burden which is what counts when measuring which people are supporting society and which are extracting more than a fair share. And ignoring the proportion of income and wealth that sector takes vs what they pay in taxes.
When hedge fund managers bringing in $billions and Warren Buffet pay lower rates than their secretaries, something is deeply wrong.
Again, a simple sense or empathy, ethics, and fairness can be your guide. These are evidently foreign concepts to you, and I recommend you look into them.
Real median household income has been steadily rising over the past few decades; it's up nearly 20% over the past 20 years[0]. American median disposable income is the highest in the world[1] that isn't a tax haven or a petrostate. Mississippi, often panned for its poverty, has a higher median household income than Germany, often considered the strongest European economy.
Now, you might point out that the CPI gets fudged in a way that doesn't fully capture the costs of living that these figures are adjusted for; I'm sympathetic to that argument, but the numbers are what they are, and the numbers do not support your claim that half of America is "barely scraping by".
> while a tiny elite hoard orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime
I'm not sure what your operating definition of "hoard" is. There are no Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins. The ultra-rich's net worth is based on ownership of companies that often times were founded by them (granted, some people inherit, though not as many in the US as in more egalitarian nations[2]), and is a fictitious figure based on the number of shares they own multiplied by the last-traded price per share. There is no world in which they could actually liquidate those shares to get the number of dollars that are thrown about.
And those companies are almost always publicly traded and owned by heaps of other people, retirement funds for middle-class workers, and whatnot; and generate value to the purchasers of the goods and services they provide. I'm not sure where in this picture comes hoarding.
> Warren Buffet pay lower rates than their secretaries
Warren Buffett paid $23.7M in federal income tax alone over five years[3]. A hypothetical secretary living in Omaha, NE making $300k would have paid $69k in federal income tax in 2025, with another $30k or so in payroll and state taxes. In five years, Buffett paid to the federal treasury alone 237 years worth of income, FICA, and state taxes that this well-paid secretary would have!
Besides, when publications talk about "lower rates" of the ultra-rich, they're always comparing taxes paid on their income against the rise in the valuation of the stock that they own. It's comparing apples and oranges to come up with sensational figures.
> the wealthy are most definitely not paying enough taxes to support the society that enabled them to earn their wealth
The society that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of earning that wealth.
> focusing only on specific federal taxes and ignoring the TOTAL tax burden
Are you claiming that there exist some other taxes through which the working masses are shouldering above their "fair share", whatever that may be, of the burdens of maintaining a functioning society? What taxes are those, exactly? Do you think if you added up all the sales, property, income, FICA, estate, etc. ad nauseam taxes that the average American pays, we'll actually discover that the unsung hero of taxation is someone making $50k a year?
Some estimate that the average American will pay roughly half a million dollars of taxes of all kinds through their lifetime, out of a lifetime earnings of about a million and a half[4]. So Warren Buffett in five years of federal income tax alone (not counting any other taxes he paid) paid as much as almost fifty average people would have over their entire lives in any taxable domain. Jeff Bezos over the same five years, nearly two thousand average lifetimes' worth. To me, it's hard to make the argument that the likes of Buffett and Bezos aren't paying enough.
> a simple sense or empathy, ethics, and fairness can be your guide
Countless millions of people have been immiserated by those preaching empathy and fairness, just in recent history. I prefer to deal in what works in the real world to enrich the lives of the average among us; and as it turns out, systems that let rich people be result in better median outcomes than systems that confiscate and punish.
What is your fair share? Moreover, what is your fair share of what somebody else worked for? How much of the earnings of a waitress, plumber, doctor, Fortune 500 exec, and Elon Musk is due to you, personally, as your empathic, ethical, and fair share?
[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income#Median_equivalis...
[2]: https://pages.github.coecis.cornell.edu/info2950-s23/project...
[3]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
There is near-zero buffer for about half of the country's people. Only 55% of adults have enough savings to cover 3 months of expenses, and 30% could not cover it by any means. 37% of people cannot even handle a $400 surprise expense out of savings, 18% can't even handle a $100 expense! Only 48% could handle a surprise $2000 expense, which is a ar breakdown or a ride to the hospital. [0]
Seven percent of adults did not have enough money to eat at times in the prior month. [0]
28% of adults went without some kind of healthcare because of the expense, and 17% are carrying medical debt. [0]
You can quibble about the exact threshold of what counts as "scraping by", if you have to worry about your next meal, worry about whether you should go to the doctor, worry about being wiped out if your car breaks down or you have a minor accident, you are scraping by. And whether that applies to exactly half, sixty percent, or "only" one third, it is too much. The wealthiest society in the history of the planet should be able to care for all of it's residents.
>>operating definition of "hoard"
Of course there are not Scrooge McDuck vaults, and they are entirely unecessary for the activity of keeping for yourself amounts of wealth that are orders of magnitude more than one could possibly spend in a lifetime.
It doesn't matter how you got it, once you are past $20-$50million, it is not about personal wealth or lifestyle (the interest alone at $25mm is over $4,000 per day); it is hoarding wealth for power, and at the cost of the rest of society
>>Warren Buffett paid $23.7M in Federal Income Tax ... 237 years worth of [secretary's taxes] Yes, and his reported $125million income reported was 416X the secretary's pay, and the $24Billion wealth gain over the five years was 16,200X the secretary's 5-year earnings. We can take Warren at his word when he says he's paing lower rates.
>> society that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of earning that wealth. Exactly. I'm glad we agree. A sound soceity is a NECESSARY condition to earning the wealth. We don't see many even millionaires coming out of low-tax states in East Africa, but they way you type scream about taxes one would expect them to be minting trillionaires.
>> deal in what works in the real world Yes, we agree. I am not proposing any kind of -ism, only making a system that is fair for all and produced the most broadly prosperous society in history, specifically the US system based around a very broad middle class.
>>systems that let rich people be I am not suggesting not letting rich people be rich, and certianly not confiscating or punishing; I'm suggesting a system that will actually have MORE people be rich
>>what is your fair share of what somebody else worked for? OK, what is the billionaire's fair share of the labor stolen from workers paid exploitation wages? When 20%+ of WalMart's full-time employees qualify for Food Stamps because we allow them to pay poverty wages, those billionaires do not have a business model, they have an exploitation model. They owe their employees a living wage, and they owe the rest of us the taxes they failed to pay to cover those food stamp benefits. They are stealing from all of us.
>>What is your fair share? How much of the earnings of a waitress, plumber, doctor, Fortune 500 exec, and Elon Musk is due to you, personally, as your empathic, ethical, and fair share?
Mine? I'm already above the threshold. OUR fair share is a fair system requiring EVERYONE to contribute, and contribute enough that the least among us have food, housing, healthcare, and education without undue worry. The entire society, especially the rich benefits when everyone is operating at their best potential, not primarily worried about being one slip from the ditch.
And while we still have income taxes (I actually think they should be eliminated in favor of transaction taxes, see other posts), the hedge funders should be required to pay tax on their millions of "carried interest", and capital gains taxes should be realized in ANY event where stock is utilized at it's current value, e.g., as collateral for a loan, not only when it is sold.
A lot of other detail, but it is not good to see the country which was the greatest in history with a large middle class slide backwards into a new corporate feudalism by allowing the rich to excessively hoard the wealth of the nation that made them rich. The irony is that the more wealth becomes concentrated, the harder it is to be and stay wealthy -look at any nation with a few rich in their gated communities - it declines for the rich even more than the poor.
Have a great new year!
[0]https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/2024-repor...
> ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that.
Which should say "two parties". There are mountains of undeniable evidence, time and time again, to this day, that this is the case.