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First, the tax code has favored increasing insurance plans instead of income: you can pay an additional $5k, do you want that as income or as insurance? Well, if it's insurance you get $5k, if it's income you'll lose 16% off the top, plus income tax. So a lot of the "wealthy" insurance plans are ways to avoid taxes. (Note that a lot of the executive pay excesses are similar workarounds to previous attempts to limit executive pay. People find ways to benefit themselves, and there are no shortage of rationalizations when they see a benefit in the offing.)
Second, a lot of people pay almost no income tax. A lot pay no income tax. Some pay a lot of income tax. We had a decent income last year, all things considered--over $60k--and after all the deductions we paid about 5.1% in federal income tax. Was that a fair share? Would 4% have been fairer? 8%? Why? Is it like FDR's raising the price of gold by $0.21, not because he has a good reason rooted in some sort of analysis but because it's 3 x 7, and those are lucky numbers (if we believe Morgenthau)?
At what point is 0% "fair"? When is 40% fair? When we hit the point that 51% pay no income tax, will that be fair? Or is 49% or 55% "fair"? If one's fair and one's not, then, Why?
And what's the basis for saying that 0% is "fair" or 40% is "fair" if I make $18k/year or $180k/year? Do we all have the same basis for the evaluation? Have we voted on it, after a long, dispassionate debate on the matter? Or is "fair" what we've come to accept, after it's been imposed by a majority on the entirety of the population? Perhaps there's a paper that isn't based on numbers, but on some sort of justice- and morality-based calculus?
These aren't easy questions. Even defining "wealthy" is difficult when politics are involved. "Fair" is often just a functional synonym for "What I'm willing to pay to to my duty to others as I see it" or "What I think others that I have no empathy for should pay because of what I think their duty to me or to others that I do have empathy for is."
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