Fair Enough!

About 1% of Americans carry 40% of their fellow citizens’ tax burden. Meanwhile, is it “fair” that 30-40% of U.S. citizens pay no federal taxes at all?

Last Wednesday, April 15, was the deadline for the annual ritual in which each of us forks over to Uncle Sam the allocated share of our earnings from the prior year. And like the blooming of perennial spring flowers, we were also treated to the predictable demands from the Left that the wealthy among us finally step up and pay their “fair share” of income taxes to ease the tax burden on everyone else.

It’s nothing new. In April 2009, in one of my earliest columns, I wrote about new President Barack Obama’s entreaty that we do so to counteract the damage caused by George W. Bush’s detestable “tax cuts for the rich.” (Sound familiar?) In the years since, we’ve heard that pitch incessantly from Bernie Sanders and his supporters. We’re hearing it now from Socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, and even from supposedly moderate Governor Abigail Spanberger of Virginia.

So let’s look at the numbers. It turns out that, under our very progressive tax code, the wealthiest among us pay a substantial share of federal income taxes. Currently, the top 1% of American wage earners pay nearly 40% of all U.S. income taxes; the top 10% pay close to 70% of U.S. income taxes; and at the other end of the spectrum, more than one-third pay no federal income taxes at all.

Moreover, those percentages haven’t changed very much in the nearly two decades since the Obama years. What has changed is that our economy has grown, there are more wage earners among us, and people at all income strata are making more money and thus paying more taxes than ever — with the net result being that tax receipts (corrected for inflation) from those top two tiers (1% and 10%) have nearly doubled. But the bad news is that during the same time frame, the deficit — the shortfall between the government’s revenue and its debt — has risen twice as fast as tax payments have increased.

Moreover, it is a well-established economic principle (and common sense) that tax increases change the spending and investment behavior of those taxed, and at some point decrease rather than increase tax revenue, which presumably was the whole idea behind raising taxes in the first place.

In short, we don’t have a taxing problem; we have a spending problem, and we’re losing ground fast. Squeezing a bit more from the wealthy won’t help at all.

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