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Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

> The rich already pay a disproportionately large amount of taxes

INCOME taxes.

Which is NOT the same as WEALTH.

If you're going to talk about "the rich" then you need to differentiate between the wealthy ownership class (the people who own things like the debt for our 20 trillion dollar illegal wars, or your mortgage), and the software engineers and doctors who get spooked by any talk of raising taxes.

This guy explains the issue in simple terms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXP8gH0wddE - He's British, but it applies to the US also.

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In the US a wealth tax is unconstitutional at the federal level. So we can only measure disproportionate income taxes by using income as a qualifier for rich.

https://www.heritage.org/taxes/commentary/1-chart-how-much-t...

Heritage isn’t a reliable service and you appear to keep linking to them. It says a bunch of weird words and terms and obfuscates all the issues while making America sound amazing.

Some countries charge a wealth tax on your total worldwide assets.

Here in the Netherlands that amounts to over 1% of total wealth.

I'm not seeing how that applies to OP's false claim that "the rich pay a disproportionate share" of taxes.

Disproportionate can have different meanings. I think that the rich pay most of the income/wealth tax [0], but that’s because that’s where the income/wealth is.

It’s disproportionate by number of persons, but arguably proportionate by income.

[0] in 2020, US, top 1% paid 42% of income tax https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3894233-how-america-actu...

> arguably proportionate by income.

That source demonstrates that it’s definitely not proportionate by income.

> the top 1 percent paid 42.3 percent of the total federal income tax in 2020 while receiving 22.2 percent of total adjusted gross income

We have a progressive taxation system on income (for good reason), which causes the high-income to pay far more than their proportional share of income.

Some will argue that they should be paying an even more disproportionate amount, which is fine and we can have that discussion, but it is an absolutely truthful claim that they are already paying a higher than proportionate share now.

Capital gains tax in US is capped at just under 25%. Regular income tax goes higher.

Capital gains is on invested capital, that capital can be lost. Also gains have already been taxed by corporate taxes, etc.

Keep in mind that marginal tax rate is not equal to effective tax rate. Also keep in mind that companies also pay tax on profit - which means that dividends get taxed at company level only to get taxed again at personal level.

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