March 4, 2023
TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:
How America Soaks the Affluent: The income tax code is steeply progressive, as 2020 IRS data show. (The Editorial Board, March 3, 2023, WSJ)
The Internal Revenue Service recently released its income and tax statistics for 2020, and they show the top 1% of earners paid 42.3% of the country's income taxes. That's a two-decade high in the share of taxes the 1% pay.That same 1% reported earnings of 22.2% of adjusted gross income (AGI) on their tax returns, which means the share of taxes paid by the top 1% as a group is roughly double their share of income. Whatever else you say about the current tax code, there's no denying that it is steeply progressive.
Begging the question why we penalize income at all. Penalize consumption.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 4, 2023 7:54 AM