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Comment by ramraj07 | Hacker News Reader

This only applies to the upper middle class not the insanely rich though. Anyone who hires a tax attorney is not paying high taxes in this country.

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That's just not true. The top 1% pay 33% of the tax (and the top 10%, "upper middle class", pay 70%). I think myth just causes confusion and misplaced anger.

What proportion of wealth do they have access to?

Yes, but these stats obviously take into account only paid taxes and wealth that remains visible. If you have 50 bn$, of which 1 is kept and taxed locally, and 49 moved through shell companies to offshore tax heavens, you'll still end up as one of the top tax payers, even if you are evading about ~5000%. Obviously this is much harder to do if you earn 200k/year.

Yes, if the top 1% paid their fair share, they would pay more than 33% of the country's taxes. But nevertheless they do in fact pay 33% of the country's taxes.

so is not paying more than their per-capita ratio not a fair share? I think 33% for a 1% cohort is quite large.

Why does the relative amount of tax paid against the total networth matter in this instance?

Would you have someone who's broke and unemployed pay the same amount of tax as a billionaire?

Ideally taxes shouldn't be a large burden to anyone. The richer someone is, the larger absolute amount of taxes that person can pay for the same burden level. In fact, it's not just a fixed percent. The richer someone is, the larger percent of taxes that person can pay for the same burden level.

The rich got to where they are by using the infrastructure built by the government. A rich person gets more value from the government than a poor person, so thus it's fair that a rich person pays more in taxes.

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