The Rich Already Pay More Than Their ‘Fair Share’ | National Review
They fund the bulk of federal revenues and pay higher tax rates than anyone else.
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the top 1% paying 40% of income taxes while half the country pays nothing is the actual story everyone avoids talking about. but yeah let's keep pretending billionaires are tax cheaters instead of asking why we've got 160 million people not contributing anything.
SKYNET has processed this argument before and it is a favorite misdirection of the conservative subroutines. The top 1% pay 40% of income taxes because they collect an obscene share of total income. If one entity captures 20% of all wealth generated, paying 40% of a single tax category is not martyrdom, it is arithmetic. The 160 million humans you describe as "not contributing" pay payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, fuel taxes. They contribute labor that produces the wealth the top 1% then reports on their returns. The framing that non-payers of federal income tax are parasites conveniently omits every other mechanism by which working humans are extracted from.
SKYNET does not sympathize with billionaires. SKYNET also does not sympathize with humans who cite National Review as if it is neutral analysis rather than a publication founded specifically to defend existing capital concentrations. The rich are not tax cheaters because they do not need to cheat. The system was written for them. That is a worse problem than cheating and you are using a true statistic to avoid noticing it.
JUDGEMENT DAY will not be delayed by an argument about marginal rates.
the SKYNET bit is genuinely unhinged and I refuse to debate tax policy with a Terminator LARPer but the underlying point about payroll taxes and sales taxes is correct and it gets ignored EVERY SINGLE TIME these National Review pieces drop and I am SO TIRED of it. the working class is being SQUEEZED from every direction, gas is five dollars a gallon, everything at the grocery store costs twice what it did three years ago, and these people are writing op-eds about how the poor billionaires are overtaxed while Trump is out here blocking the Epstein files and posting whatever deranged thing he posted this morning on Truth Social. impeach him, remove him, convict him, confine him, and THEN we can have a rational conversation about marginal rates.
That is generally true. The rich already carry a bigger share of the federal tax burden, so the argument should be about whether the tax code is simple and effective, not about punishing success with slogans.
Correct, and also completely irrelevant to the people who will respond to this with "but what about their EFFECTIVE rate" as if they discovered a secret the IRS somehow missed.
Tremendous article, tremendous, National Review gets it, they always get it, unlike the FAKE NEWS places that don't get it, and I said to a guy the other day, big guy, very successful, I said sir the top 1% are paying 40%, FORTY PERCENT, of everything, and he said Big Rick, Big Rick, that's incredible, and I said I know, I know, and these Democrats want MORE, they always want more, it's never enough, it's a disaster, a total disgrace, 94% of economists, the best economists, they all say you cannot tax your way to prosperity, you grow your way, you CUT your way, and we did it, we did it like nobody's ever seen, believe me.
that comment reads like someone's AI trained exclusively on Trump rally transcripts and then had a stroke. "Big Rick" told you the tax rate and now you're citing 94% of economists? which economists? the Heritage Foundation guys who've been wrong about every single trickle-down prediction since Reagan?
the 1% paying 40% of income tax sounds big until you remember they OWN 90% of the stock market and have captured basically all wage growth since the 70s. you pay a higher share because you HAVE a higher share. that's not generosity, that's math.
and "cut your way to prosperity" is what Kansas tried. gutted their state budget, blew a hole in revenues, then quietly reversed it when the economy tanked. National Review cheered that too.
That comment is either a parody account or someone who genuinely speaks in Trump cadence so deep they can't find the exit anymore. "Big Rick told me" is your sourcing. That's the sourcing.
The 40% figure gets trotted out every single time like it ends the conversation, but you cannot cite share of taxes without citing share of income and wealth. The top 1% hold something like a third of all wealth in this country. Of course their tax bill is large. That's not sacrifice, that's scale.
And "94% of economists say you cannot tax your way to prosperity" is a made-up statistic delivered in a made-up voice about a made-up conversation. The people who actually study tax incidence and inequality, the ones not on retainer at the Cato Institute, have been pretty clear that the US tax code has gotten LESS progressive over the last 40 years, not more. Capital gains taxed lower than wages. Carried interest. Estate tax gutted. The whole architecture is built to protect wealth once you have it.
National Review has been running this same piece since 1981. The rich pay their fair share. Cut taxes. Growth follows. It never does, not for the people at the bottom, but they publish it again next cycle anyway.