One more quick story. A close friend is a liberal. Still friends cause he's a good guy, but his politics suck. Anyway, when those stimulus checks came out earlier this year, I told him to go ahead and sign it over to me, and then I would redistribute it to people that I thought needed the money. He looked at me perlexed. I told him that's what the liberals do. They take your money and redistribute it as they see fit. He told me that wasn't the way the system worked. I just laughed and shook my head, because that's exactly the way it works. You can't even educate them with a good, practical example.
You can't really look at the tax burden that way. The tax burden is generally distributed along the income lines. I would bet that those 5% earn a much larger peice of the total income than the 95% when you include taxable gains. Going just by w-2 income your numbers may hold water, but it would be a skewed analysis.
yeah i saw the fed govt released some numbers the other day saying 1% paid over 40% (by contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent in 1987) --pretty freaking dangerous way to operate. especially when revenues are down 15%. 40% is the highest in modern history. the fact another 40% pay nothing is staggering.
Also, when did people get personal stimulus checks. Maybe I missed something? Another thing, anyone who thinks they can make it from minimum wage is pretty much kidding themselves. Being on minimum wage should be a motivator to do something else with your life, not something you should count on. You wont be much above the poverty line on minimum wage.
Can't find the article but I read somewhere that the deficit with the tax revenue decrease is estimated at 1.8 trillion and if you taxed everyone with income over 250k at 100%, you would only come up with 1.3 trillion more than we are making. And revenues are not the lowest since the depression, we had the largest percentage drop in revenue since the depression.
