@droppedit You make it sound like you know the back story of everyone posting here. Doubt it.
Also, you must be reading selectively because there seems to be quite a few of you here whining about taxes and also claiming to be in the top 20%, and therefore “elite”. You don’t seem to be “one of the few”.
I don’t know if making 100K would make me feel like I was one of the “elite”, particularly if I was putting kids through college.
I agree with the person who suggested the attempt is to spread blame and guilt down from the top 1% to the top 20% is because there isn’t enough money in the 1%, they have to hike the taxation on the middle class to get at the real money.
" there isn’t enough money in the 1%"
Sure, there is enough money. There just isn’t enough will. They hold political clout that the rest lack.
Maybe enough money if you tax them at 100% and confiscate all their assets…but that’s probably not going to happen. They are already taxed at a high rate (except for those who pay capital gains only).
I know someone who claims to be a billionaire and doesn’t pay taxes. 
Actually, the very wealthy don’t pay as many taxes as people think, at least percentage wise. There are all kinds of loopholes and ways not to declare income but still increase net worth. When you get to a certain strata of wealth, it’s not about income anyway.
@roethisburger So what? Not everyone owns homes. Where do you think the people who do all the work in the stores and businesses live? Plenty of apartments here, some catering to low income families. We do have a problem with low income housing, but it’s nowhere as bad as the situation is in Manhattan or Silicone Valley.
I think this is 100% true. What is interesting to me is the data about who that 1% is and what their political leanings are. They are not on the side that opposes income tax. Funny how that works.
Many of us on this thread are not from elite backgrounds and have (as some put it) clawed our way into the top 20% with both parents working for many years and paying off our own student loans because our non-elite parents did not pay for all of our college expenses. Public schools for us and our kids, who cannot attend full pay private colleges because we can’t afford to pay over $60K per year. And are only in the the top 20% because we live in high cost of living areas where a teacher or junior engineer may start at a salary of $50K and the median salary for a police office is north of $93K.
Living expenses are high on the coasts because more people want to live there. There is a huge range of incomes in those blue states and the highest concentration of “blues” are in the cities, not in the wealthy suburbs.
Last info I saw had the top 1% including about 1.3 million tax returns. Of course a group that large isn’t monolithic. Now sure how we would have accurate data on their political leanings beyond a survey of a limited number of them which may or may not be statistically valid.
That is true, but donations are public, and is always said here on CC, zip codes tell a lot. But you are correct that it is a large number of people.
Zip codes can tell a lot. But my guess would be most do not. The numbers are just math. Top 1% of returns will be 1% of total returns ten times more than the number of returns in top 0.1%, 100 times more than the number of rturns in top 0.01%, etc.
From this it looks like top 1% was about 1.5 million returns in 2016 and is projected to reach about 1.6 million by 2020.
You can’t fund everything for everyone, based on raising taxes for 1% of the people. While there are those who can find ways to pay little income tax and show no income, many people in that category are getting paid through earned income. And that is not easy to hide. The deductions are limited, and those people are paying the full 39.6 percent plus Obamacare and Medicare taxes on much of their income, plus state taxes in most states. And even if one makes it into that group, most people can’t expect to stay in it for very long, at least according to this study:
@Nrdsb4 :
“In his case, his success has everything to do with what family he was born into. But not the way people would always assume.”
Actually, what you wrote tells the whole story, when you say he saw his mom struggle to take care of the family, he had a role model in his mom, who worked hard to try and provide for her family with the absence of the dad, you H learned a lot from her (there is an old expression that we learn a lot more from ‘catching’ things rather than being taught things). He learned from her life isn’t easy, he learned from her that you have an obligation to your kids and a lot of other things simply by seeing that:). When people say “it is the luck of the family”, what about if your H’s mother had been someone to throw in the towel and walked away as well, and put her kids in foster care, or what if she had been someone who decided to go on welfare and whatnot and H didn’t have the role model? (and again, not saying your H had it easy, I am saying that he had a family that as tough as they had it, had a positive role model). On the other hand the kid born into a well off family where he/she is given everything, especially families with inherited wealth (more on that in a second) where the kids aren’t expected to do anything but inherit money…you might argue the kid had it made being born into a well off family, but how many well off scions end up basically with wasted lives? (The Hilton family comes to mind).
I agree luck is a funny thing, a kid can come from a horrible family but live someplace where he/she finds mentors who help, but despite what some claim, luck good or bad plays a big role in what happens to people, too, being in the right place and time has helped many people succeed, sometimes people who quite honestly otherwise would have struggled to do anything.
Part of the problem with this is there is a kind of skew to the income percentiles, as other people have pointed out they don’t allow for differences in cost of living. To someone living in rural america where median income is in the 28k range, being in the top 20% probably looks rich,where 100k is a pretty healthy income to say the least, yet in suburban areas that is basically middle class. Even being in the top 1% is not exactly wealthy in many places, it is comfortable/privileged, but it might give you a lifestyle someone in the top 10% would have elsewhere.
The real wealth is likely in the top .5%, and no, there is not enough wealth there to pay for everything, even if you taxed them at 100%. However, people in that bracket often get much of their income from ‘investment’ income, which can be heavily privileged, between deductions, but also for example that long term capital gains is taxed at 15%, so a CEO can have a lot of his/her income be taxed at this rate…or there are weird classifications of income, that allow hedge fund managers making 3 million a year get taxed at that rate. And it shows, when they analyzed Mitt Romney’s returns in 2012 election, his net taxes were at like 11% of his total income, while the person who was his secretary or in a similar position could be paying in the mid 20% range.
Not going to mention where billion dollar+ corporations end up paying no taxes…
The reality is that with tax cuts over the past almost 40 years, that it has benefitted the top earners the most, and that has dramatically led to things like the budget deficits we see, and often when they do get rid of tax deductions it tends to be ones that will hurt the middle classes (for example, in the current budget proposal, they want to get rid of deductions for state and local taxes, that will hurt middle class people who live in high tax states while giving a windfall to people in low tax states (that will further turn high tax states into being net donors to the federal government and turning the low tax states today who are the recipients, even more into recipients), the very well off on the other hand likely won’t feel too much if those deductions are disallowed.
There are no simple answers, the flat tax people throw around is a unicorn, in that it promises to cut the taxes all people pay while increasing revenue, and also likely would hurt anyone who works mostly by a W2 because they generally totally take investment income out of the money taxed. I think things like getting rid of the favored tax status for capital gains would help (why? Because despite claims, reducing the capital gains tax rate did little to nothing in terms of the new capital formation to create new jobs, as was promised, it primarily was a tax break for the people who get most of their income from investments and the financial industry), I think also they need to rationalize corporate tax rates, and basically go more to a flat model there, companies would benefit (big corporations have huge tax departments who do nothing but work on corporate taxes, to find all the deductions and loopholes and such), and it will take rationalizing the tax rates on all classes, and likely will require raising taxes across most income levels.
Recommended reading: “The Other Wes Moore.” It’s about 2 guys born a block from each other and a year apart, both named Wes Moore. One, the author, ended up a Rhodes scholar and WH Fellow, the other is serving a life sentence. Particularly interesting because the former was no angel in his early years.
How rich you see yourself as also depends on where you live. If you live in a neighborhood where no one can afford a car driving a 5 year old Ford may feel pretty swanky. If you live where everyone’s driving Lamborghinis and Teslas a new Lexus may feel like a modest, middle class car.
@sue22:
That sounds like the pickup line at the private school our S went to for grade school, that we sacrificed a lot to pay for it, we were driving a honda odyssey and to most of the people at the school, a Mercedes was like driving a Honda.
Wow, I actually agree with doschicos and musicprnt in that income from carried interest and capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as regular income. Additionally, they should be subject to social security taxes just like regular income.
Getting back on topic, I went through the different zips codes I lived in from childhood to adulthood. Except for a few years in college, it has been a steady upward progression.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/local/2013/11/09/washington-a-world-apart/?utm_term=.046b0d6b43f0
So many people pretend they are rich. They drive financed, Top of the line BMW, Ect. Owe millions on their too large home, send their kids to ridiculously expensive private pre~K through 12 schools that give their kids negligible advantages. So I enjoy pretending I’m not rich, while my child succeeded completely in a public elementary, middle and high school and will be in the Princeton class of 2021, fully payed for by a parent that has zero debt, drives a cool 4Runner and does their own landscaping around my payed off comfortably, normal sized home.
@Sue22, We are as rich as we want to think we are. If we have a big mortgage and finance all of our vehicles and chose to wear the most expensive clothes, on credit, to fit in with the crowd. We as people aren’t rich. Most are putting on a show. Spending to much and saving little while waiting for their inheritance by the people that really worked hard.