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Comment by forgotagain95 | Hacker News Reader

I am curious who is the analog to the french aristocrats. With 95% of the tax burdened by those earning more than $50k, it is crucial to define this. The median income is roughly about this value as well, so basically nearly all the tax is burdened by the top 50% earning populace. If you raise the bar further ($200k), its still nearly 60% of the taxes being paid by 5-10% of the populace. So I am not sure I buy that the "aristocrats" are "refusing" to pay their taxes. Maybe we could oversimplify to just politicians?

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I suspect this is a disingenuous question, given that almost anyone who has the above statistics also knows that they are misleading, and even false, in the context. The minutes old account age is also suspect.

High income earners pay a vanishingly low percentage of their income as tax, and it is almost all discretionary income, not income they need to merely subsist.

Low income earners pay an increasingly higher proportion of their income as tax (which is not predominantly income tax, rather things like sales, property (directly or indirectly), or ad valorum taxes.

The analog to the French aristocrats are those incredibly wealthy people who, like the former aristocracy, receive enormous income from rents and other unearned sources. That's dead simple obvious to anyone who isn't trying to live out some kind of fantasy-based ideology.

Another take on these statistics ..

from https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-its-a-myth-that-the-rich-ar... ...

Who pays most of the country's taxes -- the rich, poor or middle class? If you add up it all up, including federal income, payroll, excise (such as for gas), and state and local taxes, it's pretty even. Each group's share of total taxes is roughly equivalent to their income.

In other words, concludes Washington advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice, the U.S. tax system is only marginally progresssive, meaning that people at the top hardly pay any more than folks lower down the income ladder.

The 95% / 20% is just income tax. Total tax burden is quite different considering at least payroll taxes and the fact that a lot of the top earners simply do not pay income tax at all.

Read Capital in the 21st century and histories of the French Revolution.

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