Rich Americans Pay a Higher Share of Taxes Than the Wealthy in Most Countries (J.D. Tuccille | 6.22.2026, reason)
But the wealthy already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. “The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 23.1 percent average rate, six times higher than the 3.7 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers,” the Tax Foundation’s Erica York noted in 2024, of 2022 tax data. “The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent.”
The share of taxes paid by wealthy Americans is higher than in most other countries.
“The United States places an unusually heavy share of the tax burden on higher earners,” the Cato Institute’s Adam N. Michel commented in January. “You wouldn’t know this from hearing some politicians claim that the rich escape next to tax-free or deserve to be taxed at higher rates.”
Michel drew on a 2025 study by Canada’s Fraser Institute, which compared tax progressivity across 33 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. For those with federal systems (except Canada, for which all provinces were examined), the study looked at one high-tax and one low-tax jurisdiction for a full range of progressivity. Tax-hungry California and Texas, which has no state income tax, represented the U.S.
“California (US) (10.00) maintains the most progressive tax system out of the 45 OECD jurisdictions analyzed in this study, followed by Newfoundland & Labrador (Canada) (9.68), Korea (9.43), and Texas (US) (9.03),” observed the authors.