https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/04/as-the-rich-become-super-rich-they-pay-lower-taxes-for-real/?utm_term=.51d3699a4e50
One of the problems with the 'top 1%" discussion is that it starts at a very non rich state, 220k year is not wealthy, it is comfortably upper middle class…and reading the discussion above, it looks like those who are in the top .1 and above pay less than those who are in the rest of that 1%. It looks great on paper, chortling how the top1% pay 23%, but what that leaves out is people in the bottom end of that top 1% could be paying close to 30%, and those at the tippy top be paying only 18%. …and there is a reason f or that, people in the bottom of the top 1% get most of their income from W2 income, which is where federal taxes hit hardest, those in that top .1 and above get most of their money from capital gains, which since they can afford to hold it, is only 15% (there is also a ridiculous loophole that allows hedge fund managers to pay 15% on their income from the fund). There are also deductions, like the ones apparently the President has used on his various interests, where he can end up paying zero taxes.
Corporations, despite the claims, also these days pay a lot less to the federal government, in part because of loopholes, in part because of holding profits overseas in low tax countries, in the 1950’s corporations paid about a third of all federal taxes, today it is somewhere around 15%), so there is a significant loss of tax revenue, big corporations hve huge tax departments that do nothing but figure out how to shield profits from taxes.
And no, no one in the top end paid 90%, or whatnot, there were 24 brackets in the 1950’s…but there is a cautionary tale to be had here, comparing the past and present is difficult, because the rules have changed. For example, when the AMT was put in place it hit only a relatively small percentage of the uber rich, today people in the top 5% face it in large numbers if they live in areas where they have significant deductions (high tax states, mortgage interest, property taxes), they never indexed the amt amounts from 1968 in any kind of real way, so it soaks a lot of middle ot upper middle income people, likewise the top 1% starts at like 220k, but if you look at the 1950’s, the top 1% started in the couple of millions of dollar a year range (I assume in 2017 dollars), in many ways it is like comparing the cost of a tv today to one in 1950 and not adjusting for the technology and inflation (a couple of hundred bucks in the 1950’s for a tv was very expensive, to say the least, for that same 200 dollars in 2017 dollars you get something they couldn’t even dream of). It is like that with taxes, and throwing around percentages and the like is fraught with all kinds of statistical mumbo jumbo.
It also leaves off, not surprisingly, the plethora of federal taxes mere mortals pay that are regressive, the excise taxes, and worse, the payroll taxes, and that adds to the percent in federal taxes. SS is the classic example, for many people it is 7.5% of their income (or whatever the current rate is, they keep changing it), along with matching from their employer…for the CEO of a company, they pay off that bill on noon of january 1st,a tiny fraction of 1%, same with medicare, because of the limits. The argument the rich make is that doesn’t matter, because they can’t collect more than X from SS…which if it were a trust fund, would be correct, but SS is not, it is part of the federal budget, and with surpluses the federal government was using it in direct payments to balance the budget, along with borrowing, and it therefore is basically direct tax revenue that is regressive taxation that hits the lower classes, hard, which those defending the well off of course rationalize away and play lawyer tricks…because the treasure notes they put in place of the SS revenue, have interest that needs to be paid off…and that is part of the burgeoning debt we have, which will crowd out other federal benefits people might have gotten.
As far as the reagan tax cuts go, the proof is in the puddling, with the same levels of federal spending as before he took office, after the 1986 tax cuts the deficit soared, it was 50billion when carter left office, it was several hundred billion a year after 1986 (among other things, blows the whole idea of tax cuts paying for themselves, they didn’t and never have, pure and simple). What that means is the government was getting less revenue, and given that even conservatives agree that the biggest beneficiaries were the well off and corporations, it means that t hey were paying much less, pure and simple.
Another thing an article mentioned, back in the 1950’s most companies filed as incorporated companies, paying corporate rates. A lot of businesses when the tax code created S corporations and LLC’s changed to them, those kinds of businesses have the protections of personal assets a partnership does not, but allows the principals to file any earnings under the individual rates…and this exploded after 1986, in large part because personal rates were cut so much, which in turn cut down the very well offs tax bill.
The real thing about taxes is you have to look at all taxes people pay, and for that, the lower percentages of people pay a lot more than they ever did, payroll taxes, income taxes, all those taxes on phone service and internet service and tires and who the hell knows what, sales taxes, local taxes, property taxes, all add up and hit the lower percentiles much harder, part of the burden that happened was that states and localities lost federal support and tax revenue, and hit people through local ones.
And this isn’t pinko, it is about tax fairness, and one of the biggest ones was the capital gains tax rates, every bit of economics data has shown that cutting the capital gains tax rate does not lead to increased capital formation that builds jobs or increases GDP, in the word on Business insider magazine, it tends to create bubbles of exotic wealth spending on luxury items…that alone won’t balance the budget, the reality is that the very well off, along with the rest of us, need ot rationalize what we are spending, what we are spending it on, and balance it out. Slashing spending the way the tea party wants to do it will cause the economy to crash, the way some of the things ole Bernie proposed likely would IMO,and we need to look at federal spending and ask does this do what it is supposed to, especially in defense spending, or is it political pork to create in effect make work jobs for things that don’t really work…but I am not holding my breath.
And please, stop the idiotic crap like calling people un american, pinko, that jerk McCarthy drunk himself to death nearly 60 years ago and we don’t need that, any more than we need the idiotic “liberal” as an epithet, or the idea that somehow that there are political ideas that are manna from heaven, set in stone, ‘the truth’, or that compromise is a dirty word, if socialism doesn’t work (and I don’t think it does, pure anything doesn’t work, capitalism or socialism), or other things don’t work, then come up with new ideas and debate them (for example, you may think socialism sucks, but ask an old person on SS or Medicare what they think of it, or the people in Mitch McConnel’s district with the jobs at the auto plants, or the southern pine industry, or Boeing in the pacific northwest, or the people in rural areas who have electricity, phone service and the internet because of ‘socialist’ programs)…