The phrase has become a liturgical chant of the modern left. “Fair share.” It rolls off the tongues of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with the smooth assurance of people who never expect to be asked a follow-up question. And remarkably, they almost never are. The slogan is treated as self-evidently true, an article of faith that requires neither definition nor defense. But strip the rhetoric down to its arithmetic, and a curious thing happens. The numbers refuse to cooperate with the narrative.
Writing this past weekend in a Fox News opinion piece, financial advisor Ted Jenkin laid out the math that populist class warriors prefer to keep buried beneath the slogans. According to Internal Revenue Service data and analysis by the Tax Foundation, the top one percent of American earners already pay roughly 40 percent of all federal income taxes. The top ten percent shoulder closer to 70 percent of the total. Meanwhile, nearly half of all Americans pay little or no federal income tax in a given year. Those are not opinions. Those are receipts.