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

As for what I infer is an implication of the 9/11 attack being motivated by a desire to cover this up, I can't find any reference to the outer ring of the west wing of the Pentagon being "the accounting wing". Even if it were, I can't imagine that we're doing our federal accounting in the 21st Century on paper that's stored only in one central location.

That said, the military is in fact missing a ton of money and is not in compliance with laws that require annual audits of all federal departments. That's a huge problem that should be addressed, but I see no evidence whatsoever that it's in any way related to 9/11.

That's a great footnote! I had thought of this several years ago and found a paper detailing the finances of the Confederacy, and boy were they ugly! The Civil War could have been won without a land war at all! It would have gone bankrupt either way. It couldn't issue debt and its farming citizens were selling crops to the government at inflated prices, which it was hoping to use and sell. The blockade prevented the selling, and it had limited use.

When I think about it, the union which won learned to resort to sanctions almost exclusively.

The total income of the top 400 is just 1.3% of total income, so the tax rate on these people is largely irrelevant. The top 1%, who make 20% of all income, do indeed pay higher tax rates than everyone else. Any smaller grouping (billionaires, people making $10 million a year) comprise too small a fraction of the tax base for it to matter. Hell, you could tax the wealth of the top 400 at 100% and it would just pay for a single year of Medicare for All.

Articles like this are political cover for the upper middle class, to shield the fact that the real reason we don’t have European-style social services is that the American middle class pays vastly lower taxes. American corporate taxes and top bracket income taxes are in line with that of countries like Canada, Germany, etc. https://taxfoundation.org/sources-of-government-revenue-oecd... Until the Trump tax cuts, the actual effective corporate tax rate was higher than those countries. For example, New Zealand’s been a media darling recently on the left. But it’s got a 33% top income tax bracket, a lower corporate tax rate than California even after the Trump tax cuts, and no capital gains taxes. What it does have is a significant GST and a top income tax bracket that kicks in at $70,000.

The article paints this narrative about what’s happened since the 70% top tax brackets of the 1940s. That narrative is incorrect, because it ignores that the tax base was narrower. (Many things like corporate expense accounts were not taxed.) In fact the top effective bracket has been remarkably stable at around 40%.

It is also misleading by omission. It dismisses, without any citation, the notion that tax reform has had any effect on economic growth. In fact, the whole developed world has broadened the tax base while cutting rates, especially for businesses. While it’s hard to establish causation, Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, before Reaganism, Thatcherism, and Merkelism, was a lot less economically competitive than it is today. Canada did the same exact thing, under both liberal and conservative administrations. (Trudeau, another media darling, presides over a country with a 33% top income tax bracket and a 16.5% capital gains tax rate).

There is a proven model for how to get the kind of society the New York Times evidently wants. Look to Europe. Deregulate, cut corporate taxes, and make the middle class pay for its own benefits through high sales and social insurance taxes.

In effect what they wanted was for their citizens to be able to write off a much higher level of state and local taxes against the Federal tax debt owed. This is how high tax states in turn claw back money their citizens would other pay to the Feds, by being able to write it off Federal taxes State taxes can be increased and the burden passed along.

Not much different than some subsidies that favor wealthy households over all others in the form of "saving the environment". Watch how holier than thou a hand out is defended with to understand how money is given back to those least needing it. I am guilt of accepting the $7500 handout TWICE for EVs. I have always though that it should have been restricted to much less expensive cars to encourage their development but instead the Federal credit has no limit, car price or income level. IF you pay that much Federal Tax you got it back.

So don't just focus on how much the "rich" pay or don't pay, also focus on all the handouts to people with good to great incomes just masked behind feel good names. (education - in particular master and higher degrees is a subsidy to the same)

[0] https://reason.com/2019/10/07/federal-court-rules-against-bl...