When you see this statistic quoted that the top 1% pays 47% of tax revenues, why do we pretend that is made up of billionaires?

The top 1% are highly paid doctors, lawyers, engineers, managers, sales people and also include to a lesser extent athletes and actors who are paid as wage workers.

Billionaires are the top 0.000002%

Note – Double check my math, but I looked up records for billionaire taxes paid from 2014 – 2018 and estimated those I couldn’t find and divided that by non-payroll tax revenues for those years.

Edit:

Washington Post is saying top 400 tax payers pay 2% of all taxes in 2014 (in 2014 there were 400-500 billionaires in the US)

The richest 25 billionaires paid far less.

Billionaires pay less than 1% of tax revenues in the US. They are not the 1% paying 47% of tax revenues (the top 1% are mostly highly paid wage workers).
byu/DataWhiskers ineconomy



by DataWhiskers

7 comments

  4. Gotta wonder why D’s never make a move to do something about it in the tax codes?

  5. Am I the only one who thinks everyone should just pay a flat rate? Like I would be outraged if WM+ or AMZN Prime charged higher fees based off how much I use the platform…

  6. Right but they need more money to invest in huge funds like Black Rock…to uh…make jobs?

    Because…normal supply and demand wouldn’t ever allow companies to form…

    And somehow billionaires dumping money into hedge funds creates jobs instead of just becoming bonuses for financiers and increased stock prices for they themselves who own the stocks?

    It’s all very complicated and us proletariat folks wouldn’t understand but, it trickles down.

  7. What is the average income of the top 1% in 2025? CBO has estimates of average income by quintile and for the top 1% (among other percentiles). CBO estimates that the 1.2 million households in the top 1% have an average income of $2 million, for a total income of $2.4 trillion. The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI of $663,164 and above) paid the highest average income tax rate of 26.1 percent, or, seven times the rate faced by the bottom half of taxpayers which is 40.4% of all Federal income tax collected. The bottom 50% of taxpayers, nearly 77 million taxpayers with income less than $50,339, together paid 3% of the total Federal income taxes collected by the IRS.

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