Top 10% is the upper middle class, not the ultra rich. A successful surgeon making $1M per year is paying well over 40% a year in taxes, while Bezos is paying 1%.
If we're bringing receipts, how about you start? Do you have the data for this initial statement of yours?
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...
- The top 1% of income earners pay 40.4% of the total U.S. Federal Income Tax receipts
- Top 5% pays 61.0%
- Top 10% pays 72.0%
- Top 25% pays 87.2%
- Top 50% pays 97.0%
If you look at all taxes, the share paid is remarkably close to the share earned. According to https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2024/, in 2024, the top 1% earned 20.1% of income while paying 23.9% of taxes. The bottom 20% paid 1.5% of taxes while earning 2.6% of income.
Within that group, the share is not evenly distributed, though.
Most who are in the 1% club are people who are earning wage income, like doctors, and are getting absolutely reamed with taxes. The vast majority of the 1% are not rich enough to be doing elaborate schemes to avoid taxes.
Billionaires, who are in the top 0.0002%, are an entirely whole different story. There are many figures that show they generally do not pay their fair share in taxes.
Top 50%: $53k/year
Top 25%: $93k/year
Top 10%: $155k/year
Top 5%: $210k/year
Top 1%: $450k/year
$155k is a top 10% income.
His assets are not income. Just like your assets are not taxed.
Ok, but he does that loan-against-assets hack!
Well the fact is that those loans eventually need to be paid, so at some point he will pay that 40% (unless he does the step-up basis hack when he dies)
Ok, but he should be paying annually like everyone else!
Well, technically he is, his assets, the company Amazon, pays a lot of taxes annually. The government views Amazon as a money printer, states get their sales taxes, and the federal government gets their income taxes. All of which originate with Amazon.
All of which is to say, that the uppe-middle/upper-class, the successful surgeon, is the one that needs to be paying more taxes to equilibriate society.
I'm sure we can count that as a given.
> The government views Amazon as a money printer, states get their sales taxes, and the federal government gets their income taxes.
Except when states fall all over themselves to give Amazon a massive tax break to build their second HQ.
It's very unlikely, he has pledged to give away most of his wealth in his lifetime, but there are a variety of factors that will always add space for detractors to make fair points. Bill Gates is still worth billions despite being an endless waterfall of charity money for decades.
Either way, the step-up thing is way way way more common in the upper class, where people with ~$24M want their kids to get $6M each. These people are nobodies with no public image, and light years away from "Billionaire Class" status.
>Except when states fall all over themselves to give Amazon a massive tax break to build their second HQ.
All the employees will pay income tax, and they will mostly spend their money in the state, generating sales tax. Then there is the second order effect of businesses that pop-up to feed off the money that the employees make.
What's often missed, and never explained, is that the government loves businesses, because businesses convert people into tax revenue, on almost all levels. Don't miss that.
The businesses that are laying off employees because of competition from Amazon were less efficient and this employed far more people than Amazon does, thus paying more in taxes.
> It's very unlikely, he has pledged to give away most of his wealth in his lifetime,
The ultra rich give away donations in the form of stock, so they never sell it, just transfer it. So no tax to them and they get a tax deduction for the donation fair market value.