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Having ruined my son's day with this information, I made myself feel even worse by digging deeper into the details of tax avoidance by the wealthy. To get into the 1% club, it takes about $400,000 in salary $400,000 in salary. Members of the club can make up to 10,000 times MORE than this and pay ZERO taxes because they don't call their income "income" like we do. They call it "carried interest," which means they can defer taxes almost indefinitely.

Then I went back a few years to the 1970s when soon-to-be-in-power Republicans became convinced that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue. It didn't work. Federal revenues are currently at their lowest level in 60 years. The average federal tax rate has gone way down for the richest 1%. Yet, remarkably it's gone UP for everyone in the 40th to 95th percentiles of taxpayers, which includes most of the rest of us.

How do wealthy individuals respond? They pout, and avoid taxes even further with clever strategies, such as hiring "full service tax evasion advisers" to help them elude the Internal Revenue Service.

It got worse when I compared my son's taxes to those of corporations. In the 1950s, for every dollar of payroll tax paid by workers, corporations paid three dollars. Now they pay 16 cents.

(much more)