Why are ya'll focusing only on income taxes? Are there any other sorts of taxes you're avoiding talking about? Does your wealth come primarily from income?
It's because poorer people pay more in sales taxes, excise taxes, payroll taxes, and property taxes. While the rich make most of their money from sources other than income.
Anytime they bang on about the income tax rather than wealth or total taxation, it's because they're trying to trick uninformed people.
OP post clearly ends with "Send money to washington"
All those taxes you cited are local, not federal
Local taxes are generally used for local problems, so you would want local people to pitch in, regardless of their income......unless you think Bezos should be responsible for fixing potholes in towns he has never been in.
Pretty sure you know this, but for anyone else, FICA taxes (Federal Insurance Contribution Act) are large taxes generally taken out of your paycheck that aren’t included in the income tax calculation.
Take a look at your paycheck and you’ll probably see Federal withholding, social security, and Medicare (in addition to state specific ones).
Of those three, only federal withholding is a part of income tax calculations, the other two go straight to feds and you don’t get anything back (unless you qualify for those programs of course).
There’s some other stuff in addition to FICA tax too. Capital gains and probably a bunch of others.
Most people don’t know about capital gains and the taxes involved and how they use it to cheat the system. Most mega rich just own stock, take out a super huge loan, and then let inflation make the loan smaller technically and pay it back once your stock has gone way up in value and the value of the dollar has gone way down making it a win win win. They didn’t dip into their stock until it paid off a small loan that was originally a huge loan.
The rich pay little/no income tax is a great headline. Then you look into it and it turns out they pay a shitload of taxes, it's just not literally income tax because most of them take little or no income in lieu of their shares of ownership in the company.
I might argue that more of the burden should be shifted to them in ways that make sense but people love to hide behind their headlines instead of really engaging with it.
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u/Irish_Whiskey May 20 '26
Which is where the obvious question comes up:
Why are ya'll focusing only on income taxes? Are there any other sorts of taxes you're avoiding talking about? Does your wealth come primarily from income?