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Comment by drabiega | Hacker News Reader

Not sure that is a relevant measure. Those people will also be paying a relatively low percentage of their income to taxes overall thanks to taxes which are flat or capped, so I'm not sure why it's meaningful what percent of tax revenues they contribute.

As an admittedly extreme example, if the population consisted of 100 people who make 2$ and pay 1$, and one guy who makes $1000 and pays $100, he's responsible for half the tax income but probably still isn't paying his fair share since he's only paying 10% instead of 50%.

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Well, considering ~40% of Americans pay no income tax, I'd say the top is paying more than their fair share?

Because total tax expenditures are far from just income tax. There's property taxes, vehicle taxes, gas taxes, "christian sin" taxes, lottery (which is a tax on stupid people), social security tax, medicare tax, sales tax, specific item/service sales tax, city taxes, county option taxes.

And that's not even remotely the amount of taxes on businesses that raise the price of goods secretly to compensate the taxes hidden.

And also, even illegal immigrants pay these taxes. They aren't even exempt. And many use fraudulent SSNs, so taxes are taken an applied to those SS accounts, but the illegals never use them. Yet more money for the coffers.

But some percentage isn't paying any of one specific tax.

Whatever.

Income taxes still make up a near 50% of total tax dollars, right?

So the only response to that 'fair share' argument is still only "take more from those that have/work and give to those that don't/can't".

I mean fine, but let's call it what it is.

> lottery (which is a tax on stupid people),

The lottery is a tax on hope

How is that relevant?

Incomes taxes (not including payroll taxes) make up ~47% of all federal dollars coming in. Payroll taxes (Medicare, SS), make up 34%, but half of that is paid by the employer, so it's really 18%.[1]

So income taxes represent almost 3x the income stream that payroll taxes do. So I'd say not paying income taxes is a pretty big break in my book.

[1]http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-source...

That's just for the Federal system, it ignores all state taxes.

The top 3% do pay their fair share. More than their fair share really. It is the .1% or even .01% that draw far more from society than they pay.

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