About that ‘Fair Share’

There are two words that kept coming up over and over again over the last 20 months during the US Presidential circus: ‘fair share’.
Hardly a day went by without hearing that certain taxpayers ‘need to pay more of their fair share.’
It sounds really great, and given the voter statistics, this idea resonated with tens of millions of people. After all, who could possibly be against fairness?
When you dive into the numbers, however, the data doesn’t support this assertion at all.
According to IRS figures, households that earn more than $1 million annually, roughly 0.4% of all taxpayers, pay a total of $364 billion in federal income tax.
This amounts to roughly 27% of all the US federal individual income tax that’s collected.
So in other words, the top 0.4%, pays 27% of the total tax bill.
If you extend this analysis to the upper middle class, i.e. the top 24.5% of households earning more than $100,000 per year, the numbers are even more dramatic.

This post was published at Sovereign Man on November 21, 2016.