$400B/2.5T= 16%. Also, it’s paid after all expenditures, unlike those who are paying it on their income, and not through corporation tax sheltering.
I’m not unfamiliar with statistics. And the 50% who pay no federal income tax are paying oodles through opportunity cost. End all entitlements, and create only a consumption based tax, with NO allowances/deductions or credits, and eliminate all government spending, and you’ll create freedom. Until then, the elites (ala George Soros) merely manipulate the ignorant into thinking the politicians are cause of the problems.
16% is 16% and 0% is 0%. $400B extracted from 1.5M people is an average of $267K in Federal Income Tax from each person in that group. Government is the only good or service where two people who receive exactly the same item are charged wildly different prices — and do not have the option of declining. How’d you like it if the grocery store demanded to know how much money you make before they set YOUR “special” price for a gallon of milk ?
Even a Sales Tax would not be “fair” to the wealthy, it would just be more fair than what we have.
A 10% sales tax on all retail goods and services would collect more revenue than both individual and corporate income taxes. I’m all for eliminating these income taxes completely. Also eliminate the employee side of the payroll tax and simply have the employer pay 10% on all labor and dividend expenditures to fund any social safety net (replace SS with a poverty-level wage replacement at retirement age, and people can save the 7.65% they were paying in FICA to flesh out their retirement). Together, these two taxes would more than replace the existing Federal Income and Payroll Tax revenues while making the US the cleanest tax environment for businesses to operate in.
PS. The reason the “wealthy” and corporations were able to “pay” high tax rates in the 50’s & 60’s was because they could pass those costs along to consumers in what was essentially a captive market, ie. before the global economy stocked the shelves of WalMart and the auto showrooms. If American producers try to pass along tax increases today, a foreign competitor eats their lunch, and another American business goes overseas or bites the dust. Democrats have always understood the wealthy and corporations would pass along the tax costs and they count on it so they can vilify the “wealthy” and buy votes from the “poor” — they’ve scapegoated the wealthy when they knew all along the impact would really hit the poor and middle classes.