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For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

nytimes.com

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Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#121

Post by dmix »

coldtea wrote: post #77
refurb wrote: post #19

What a shit article. It's well known that despite the high marginal tax rates of the past, very few people ever paid those. Deductions abound that have since been eliminated. What you should really look at is real effective tax rates by income level.[1] What you'll find is that the top 1% make 19% of all income, but pay 37% of all taxes, with an average tax rate of 27%. The bottom 50% earn 11% of all income, but only…

If society was a rich person with 1 billion paying $1M in taxes, and a regular person with $50K income paying $10K in taxes, the rich person would have paid nearly 99% of all taxes. And yet, they would have paid a pittance compared to their income (not to mention wealth), and it would absolutely no impact on their purchasing power or lifestyle (where the 10K of the 50K could make the difference between having savings…

In your example they’d also be making 99.9%+ of the income.

I don’t see how that’s relevant when the OP already used relative terms.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#122

Post by [deleted] »

coldtea wrote: post #77
refurb wrote: post #19

What a shit article. It's well known that despite the high marginal tax rates of the past, very few people ever paid those. Deductions abound that have since been eliminated. What you should really look at is real effective tax rates by income level.[1] What you'll find is that the top 1% make 19% of all income, but pay 37% of all taxes, with an average tax rate of 27%. The bottom 50% earn 11% of all income, but only…

If society was a rich person with 1 billion paying $1M in taxes, and a regular person with $50K income paying $10K in taxes, the rich person would have paid nearly 99% of all taxes. And yet, they would have paid a pittance compared to their income (not to mention wealth), and it would absolutely no impact on their purchasing power or lifestyle (where the 10K of the 50K could make the difference between having savings…

[deleted]

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#123

Post by wnissen »

fencepost wrote: post #81
refurb wrote: post #19

What a shit article. It's well known that despite the high marginal tax rates of the past, very few people ever paid those. Deductions abound that have since been eliminated. What you should really look at is real effective tax rates by income level.[1] What you'll find is that the top 1% make 19% of all income, but pay 37% of all taxes, with an average tax rate of 27%. The bottom 50% earn 11% of all income, but only…

Which taxes are you counting there? Including sales taxes? And I take with a huge block of salt any tax article with phrases like "These charts don’t tell us whether the top 1 percent contains the same people year after year, experiences a complete turnover annually, or something in between." Good heavens, I hadn't realized that a 100% turnover in the top 1% of earners was possible! Those investments must be doing te…

No, just income tax, the only portion of the tax code that is nominally progressive. Payroll taxes are explicitly regressive, going away at an income of roughly the top 5%. Sales taxes are flat.

Even income taxes aren't as progressive as you would think, because a large fraction of upper-class wealth comes from dividends and capital gains, which are taxed at a rate below the income of a household earning $78,951 year! The biggest tax deductions are for homeowners (including second homes) and retirement savings, which overwhelmingly go to the wealthy. The idea that the wealthy pay a high tax rate is absurd if you look at the whole picture.

https://smartasset.com/taxes/dividend-tax-rate

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#124

Post by gok »

It's hard to figure out how they got that chart that I've now seen pasted about a dozen times around social media. They cite an unpublished book. But it looks comically wrong. The bottom decile's tax rate is nowhere near 25%. The entire bottom quintile's tax rate is around 3%, and less than 2% for federal taxes.

Perhaps the book plays some games with what constitute a "tax rate?" For example, if you spend double your income on consumption (not uncommon for low income people, especially those who benefit from programs like EITC and SNAP) and then pay sales tax, you could squint really hard and say that a 10% state sales tax is effectively a 20% income tax. But that's crazy; this number would keep going up the more wealth transfer happens.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#125

Post by ivalm »

mcv wrote: post #67
ggreer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would just renounce their US citizenship and move to a country with lower taxes. That’s what Eduardo Saverin did.

They didn't do that in the 1950s, though. It does address an important point, though: should you pay tax based on where you live, or on where your income comes from? Governments invest a lot in their country, their citizens, education, a healthy market, etc. For foreign companies to profit from that healthy market but not pay taxes there, seems wrong. Similarly, for people to work in a healthy labour market but not p…

About 30% tax haircut (on assets) if you renounce citizenship and try to repatriate money.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#126

Post by refurb »

rtkwe wrote: post #69
refurb wrote: post #19

What a shit article. It's well known that despite the high marginal tax rates of the past, very few people ever paid those. Deductions abound that have since been eliminated. What you should really look at is real effective tax rates by income level.[1] What you'll find is that the top 1% make 19% of all income, but pay 37% of all taxes, with an average tax rate of 27%. The bottom 50% earn 11% of all income, but only…

That's 37% of income taxes not 37% of all taxes. Also important is those numbers will be based on the federal and reported income numbers not based on the amount they actually earn much of which can be shifted around to specifically avoid the top marginal rate.

The total tax rates are available if you google it, including state tax, sales taxes, etc.

The trend is more muted (the poor pay a slightly higher percent of the total), but the rich still pay the majority of taxes and have a much higher effective rate.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#127

Post by dekhn »

cpr wrote: post #75
hos234 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. That's the strategy the Military uses - https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pent... "At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate"

Remember when Rumsfeld announced that 2.3T USD were missing from the military? https://www.city-journal.org/html/americas-missing-money-157... Yeah, nor do most people. The date he announced that? September 10, 2001. The section of the Pentagon hit? The accounting wing with all the records.

ummm, are you making an oblique "9/11 truther" claim?

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#128

Post by newen »

makomk wrote: post #48
tartoran wrote: post #3

That is correct, the rich don't pay any taxes at all (whenever the can). The was a recent thread on HN regarding tax audits [0]. What I got from that is that the IRS cannot afford to audit the rich because their taxes are complicated and they don't have enough resources to do so. They choose to audit the poor instead because, it is simpler.. link [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21176705

Careful. The two articles rely on vastly different cherry-picked definitions of who counts as rich, and neither claim is even remotely true anymore if you use the other definition. The top 1% are indeed audited at about the same rate as the working poor, but they also pay higher taxes than everyone else. This NYT article on the other hand picks out the top 400, who apparently pay lower taxes but are much more aggress…

Lower tax rates, not necessarily lower taxes.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#129

Post by partingshots »

sorenn111 wrote: post #55
partingshots wrote: post #22

So since this is all 100% legal, are there resources available for people like us in the upper middle class bracket working as engineers in Silicon Valley to take advantage of all this? Almost half of my salary goes to taxes every paycheck. That’s almost $150,000 I literally never get to see just taken away.

If you're earning 300k (estimated from the almost 150k you said you pay in taxes), are you really in the upper middle class? from this article [1], 300k salary puts you in the top 5% of income earners. i don't know how you figure that makes you upper middle class? [1]: https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-much-incom...

When the equivalent of a trailer home costs at minimum a million dollars to buy, yes I do.

And you can’t just say move somewhere else. Anywhere else that offers the same salaries has similar housing costs.

Re: For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans paid a lower tax rate

#130

Post by refurb »

gok wrote: post #124

It's hard to figure out how they got that chart that I've now seen pasted about a dozen times around social media. They cite an unpublished book. But it looks comically wrong. The bottom decile's tax rate is nowhere near 25%. The entire bottom quintile's tax rate is around 3%, and less than 2% for federal taxes. Perhaps the book plays some games with what constitute a "tax rate?" For example, if you spend double your…

Even more shocking is this is a “prestigious” national newspaper.
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