No, the Rich Are Not Paying Anywhere Near Their "Fair Share" in Taxes

If you're rich, it's highly unlikely you got that way entirely by yourself. You were born into a well-off family, and benefited from the many handouts, privileges and bonuses available only to the children of the wealthy. Everything you have you got because of the education, health care, safety, personal networks and experiences denied to the non-rich.

That's why industrialized democracies have progressive taxation: the more money you have, the greater percentage of your wealth you pay in taxes.  Because the more money you have, the more you're benefited from the civilized society those taxes pay to build.

But that's gotten lost in the only-the-rich-are-really-human economy of the last 30 years.

Paul Campos at Lawyers, Guns and Money:

Silicon Valley mogul opines:

According to the latest 2012 IRS income-tax data, the top 1% of American taxpayers earned 20% of all income and paid 36% of all taxes. The top 5% earned 36% of all income and paid 58% of all taxes. Will even higher taxes help the economy? My experience in Silicon Valley tells me that high and so-called progressive taxes are a major cause of the country’s current economic problems, not the solution.

In fact the quoted numbers are the percentages of personal federal income tax paid by the referenced groups, not “all taxes.” This is a critical distinction, because the vast majority of taxes paid by most Americans are not in the form of personal federal income taxes. When one looks at all taxes, the share paid by the richest 1% falls by nearly half, from 36.7% to 21.6%. Since the top 1% “earned” (very loosely speaking) 21% of all income, this means the U.S. basically doesn’t have a progressive tax system.

 In the 1950s, under President Eisenhower, millionaires paid 90 percent of their marginal income in taxes - a policy that contributed to a world-beating economy that allowed middle-class workers to support a family, suburban mortgage, cars, vacations and college educations on a single income.

Now billionaires pay barely 30 percent of their incomes in taxes, and not even Somalia envies us our no-jobs, no-benefits, no-safety-net hellhole of an economy.

That's not a coincidence.