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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

Not true.

If you read the article, you'll find a graph which shows the fractions of income: https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/itOyNXaN9ah...

The top 3% of US taxpayers had a combined ~28% of income. You have to go up to the top ~12% of US taxpayers to accumulate 50% of income.

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The NY times recently ran a story about Jared Kushner paying no, or almost no taxes after showing a loss by using some legal, but creative accounting around depreciation. I've heard the same thing about owners of sports teams.

So, when it comes to the 1% it can be hard to measure who's actually in it.

Asset depreciation is at best a temporary game - for example I racked up depreciation on a rental property, and during the years I did so, I paid less in taxes. When I sold the property I had to account for that depreciation and pay taxes on all of it.

There is a big difference between cherry picked examples and what happens on average.

We’ve all heard of millionaires paying no taxes, yet the top 0.1% pay an effective rate of 36% on average (too lazy to look up source again).

What % of discretional income did the top 3% have?

Not sure what you mean by "discretional". Disposable (after-tax) income? Or discretionary income (which depends on where you draw the line for a "basic standard of living)?

In either case, this is irrelevant to the fact that getcrunk made a false claim.

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