Taxing the rich is fine, likely even necessary, but it’s hardly sufficient. The major problem facing the West is that our economic policy is dictated by short term growth. This is because individual investments (retirement plans and pensions, the largest holders of equities) demand that growth. The amoral psychopaths who implement those demands in exchange for money are abundant and replaceable. They do skim an excessive amount off the top, but they aren’t the root of the problem.
The demand for growth at all costs is what led us to outsource our core industries, sell off the mines and factories, and financialize every aspect of the economy. Higher taxes would not have prevented this. Even if we confiscated all the wealth of the top 1%, it would not fund our obligations for long and it would not correct our trajectory.
The postwar US was very different. Cold War paranoia and military Keynesianism ensured that core industries were well funded and key infrastructure was built and maintained. Modern China uses a unique model where the central government sets a vision and provinces allocate state investments according to regional needs. Neither of these models is probably appropriate for the present day US, but there must be something out there besides neoliberalism and full privatization. (Futarchy? Some new branch of government to direct state investment? Allow states to own and operate businesses? Creativity is necessary.)
@iamnowhere this is music to my ears. Under the slap stick stupidity of Congress (albeit with real consequences unfortunately) lay bigger problems.
I'll redo the argument slightly differently. The core management problem is demands on resources always exceed resources. So perhaps the single salient aspect of management is the strategy and parameters which yields a procedure on what demand to reject leaving YES to remaining demands.
One weakness of the current strategy is it's too greedy and short termed. Now perhaps the Chinese take it too far the other way (not consequence free btw) but we USA are too anemic short term.
Perhaps one change post 1980 is prices may have to go up to trade for longer term stability and jobs in the US. Second, although I think corps and top 5% are under taxed (after writeoffs are incl) Washington's congress doesnt have the institutional credibility to tax it because perpetual debt spending is normal ... which is variation on all that matters is the next election ie short term thinking.
Congress is really competent about getting voters stuff now --- they have no self sourced and self disiplined way to manage demands --- and paying for it after the next election by more debt. Nowadays they even stopped faking concern about debt.
> The core management problem is demands on resources always exceed resources. So perhaps the single salient aspect of management is the strategy and parameters which yields a procedure on what demand to reject leaving YES to remaining demands.
True and important. One reason the US did so well after WWII was that resources were abundant, and the technology to exploit those resources improved rapidly until the middle of the century. Although I think industrial policy and infrastructure helped as well.
> Perhaps one change post 1980 is prices may have to go up to trade for longer term stability and jobs in the US.
I definitely think so. It’s strange how luxuries have become so cheap while essentials (food, transportation, and shelter) keep becoming more expensive. As a society I think we could afford to pay a little more for things like smartphones and TVs if that money could be moved towards lowering the cost of essentials. Tariffs and state investment (Intel) may have actually opened the door to thinking about things like this, but we’re a long way from a coherent strategy. I also worry that the bungling of these things may lead the next administration to return to business as usual, if that’s even possible at this point.
Here again I agree. Housing, health insurance, and education costs have risen far exceeding inflation elsewhere. Post-covid food prices are higher and may not return anytime soon. These are serious head winds for the bottom 70%.
Now the return of the 1960s seems nieve when the middle class was more secure. The return of clothing manufacturers, umbrella, USB cords, and a lot of the misc stuff made in China we get at Kmart is not and should not come back to the US.
We could do better by getting more of our supply chain in medicine, manufacturing into NA or Europe. We could also help by a 10 year plan to get debt down with consequent reduction on interest payments in DC. Interest payments on debt are among the top 3 largest federal spends.
Bush junior tried to increase housing ownership which indirectly lead to the 2008 crisis since lenders and brokers passed risk to the fed among other things. Perhaps the fed ought to work with states to simplify and make zoning uniform. From what I understand zoning complications are a major contributor to housing shortage on the supply side.
This is an incomplete list ... but you're right: Washington is a 100 light years away from a technocratic industrial policy that is hybrid capitalism through state strategy.
> Neither of these models is probably appropriate for the present day US, but there must be something out there besides neoliberalism and full privatization. (Futarchy? Some new branch of government to direct state investment? Allow states to own and operate businesses? Creativity is necessary.)
The French already pioneered this[0]. Their GDP per capita has flatlined for over 15 years, though in real terms (PPP) it's fairing better. Notably, they remain a modern Western nation that still has significant capability for building new things.
Yes, that’s a great example and it’s unfortunate for the French that France has been steadily moving away from it.
I think that part of the problem is that holding firm against international capital, domestic opportunists, currency speculators, and so on requires an iron political will and a certain tolerance for short term pain. Postwar France was able to manage this but later generations don’t have the same perspective. It may be a cyclical political problem without a good solution, other than documenting the problem for future generations whenever it arises.
> This is because individual investments (retirement plans and pensions, the largest holders of equities) demand that growth.
I don't disagree with you but it's much worse in the EU, where mandatory contribution to the state for pension funds are gigantic ponzi schemes: the money wasn't invested in equities but directly spent. Now most EU countries are heavily indebted and simply shall soon have no way to honor the pension they promised their citizens. Greece already (partially) defaulted on its public debt a few years ago. More countries shall follow. France is in a particularly bad position at the moment, for example.
Now there are private, optional, pension funds in the EU and citizens have to opt-in to these and these do put their funds in equities etc. Still beats a full-on ponzi, if you ask me.
Oh yes, same with Social Security in the US. I think we will be able to keep it going a little longer than EU pensions, but short of a miracle (or massive inflationary printing) there’s no way it will stay afloat.
How would massive inflationary printing solve the fact that at some point in the future there will not be enough people working to support people in retirement? (I think inflation would make the problem worse, as the current amount of money in the Social Security Fund would lose its value. But I could be wrong.)
Printing could fund entitlements at the cost of diluting purchasing power for everyone (including retirees). But Social Security is indexed to inflation, so it would pay out more as long as the government chooses to fund it through whatever means are available. Effectively this would continue to fund retirees while taxing all nonretirees, especially those who don’t own assets. Not a great situation and it would have political consequences, but it is theoretically possible.
I think we have enough people to theoretically support retirees (Japan does it with worse TFR), the problem is that declining relative wages makes it politically difficult, as lower earners would share a disproportionate burden. And retirement is just one issue of many, we are trying to run a giant resource-hungry country on a service economy. We’re only able to get away with this by using our aging military resources to force other countries to accept our role as a global middleman. It isn’t sustainable.
I now understand what you mean. This is how post-WW1 Germany tried to pay its WW1 "fines" which were pegged to gold [0]. The result was hyper-inflation - and 2 years later when this scheme was thrown out the currency stabilized. Most likely the same would happen in your scenario - the retirees would come ahead for a while, but only for a short time. So I do not think this is a solution for retirees (no matter their large political power)
These days currencies have no real assets behind them. One cannot expect to be able to purchase real goods / services indefinitely with a fictional construct (fiat currency)
It’s more complicated than that, as Germany’s punitive war debt was designed to cripple it and it didn’t have many options. It’s actually fairly difficult to create hyperinflation without being trapped in an extreme situation. But I agree that it’s generally a bad idea to put yourself at risk of it.
Fiat isn’t necessarily backed by nothing, that’s a misconception. It’s backed by the strength of the underlying economy, the perceived value of claims on the nation’s resources and services, the political stability of the nation, and the need to hold that currency for trade. The problem with fiat is that when those things are in decline, the lack of hard assets can cause a rapid devaluation, as the “invisible assets” backing the currency are now devalued. This compounds the decline.
Ok ok. I can’t wait to see how 2026 and 2027 will shake out. Trump’s choice to replace Jerome Powell will drive short term interest rates to zero because, among other things, US pays around $1 trillion / year in interest for its debt.
Getting these rates to 0 will require the Fed to print massive amounts of USD. Let’s see then how the USD is backed by something other than thin air.
(BTW - lots of countries managed to achieve hyperinflation: Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Russia and my home country of Romania in the 90s. It is not that difficult)
Romney was a fairly purple-ish candidate. As governor of Massachusetts, he introduced the forerunner of the ACA. He was popular in a deeply blue state. He’s been deeply critical of some of Trumps actions.
So what went wrong? He was smeared as a racist misogynist. (On popular leftist sources like ‘The View’.). No doubt that hurt his chances in 2012.
Both charges are false, of course. Romney is a gentle Mormon bishop with a Black grandchild. His guidance has fomented great careers for many female colleagues and employees.
One has to wonder what might have been had Romney won in 2012. It may have brought the right further left, and may have changed the Republican nominee in 2016. But that’s not the way things unfolded.
To be fair, he really played down/ backpedaled and shifted right from a lot of positions he took as Massachusetts governor when running for federal office.
I thought he did very decent job here in Massachusetts, but was really hard to see him run away from that experience in his presidential campaign. His “binders full of women” gaffe seems quaint now days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binders_full_of_women
Decent enough person/politician despite coming from management consulting. He didn’t loose his spine in Washington.
2012? Against the wildly popular incumbent? Blaming it all on smears seems like a rationalization. So the real question is what would have happened if Romney had run in 2016. But we basically know what would have happened, because there were other moderate/conservative candidates who did run in 2016. And the answer to that is the Republican party would have still fallen for the temptation of the New York democrat con artist who paid lip service to their longstanding frustrations but didn't have any actual policy beyond "burn it all down".
> American parties always seem to maintain party discipline over their members, forcing those with other views to either remain silent, or leave.
I mean, why wouldn't they? If you ran a party, and one individual seem (from your perspective) to hold opinions that goes against what you and others believe the party is for, wouldn't you also want them to leave your party?
Shouldn't be that hard of a problem really, if we could accept that people change beliefs and opinions as life goes on, and if you have more than 2 political parties as real options, people could be a bit more diverse and nuanced with their spoken opinions.
If you ran a party, and one individual seem (from your perspective) to hold opinions that goes against what you and others believe the party is for, wouldn't you also want them to leave your party?
I have run and worked for businesses in which dissenting views were important to our success. I don't personally find your argument persuasive.
But I do know people who find that kind of thing very persuasive: I think it would most appeal to the type of person who believes that groups of people should be managed in a strict hierarchal manner, with the people on top managing things for their own benefit.
And—confirmation bias alert—IMO that's absolutely what both of America's parties do, and why it is difficult for their voters to get even of a fraction of the benefits that the donors (who may donate to both parties) enjoy.
Recently the democratic party intentionally granted just enough votes to let a budget pass. That was, as far as I can tell, identical to the same thing they wouldn't vote for weeks prior.
I think they can handle ideological differences. You just need to be able to radically change your vote by fiat of the party leadership.
That's a weird way to describe "enough democratic senators dissented from the party line to let a CR pass".
Unlike the republicans, the democrats have never been able to maintain that kind of tight control over members. The CR didn't pass because "democrats" chose to let it. It passed because the republicans were able to individually influence 5 additional democrats to change their votes, in addition to the 2 who had always voted for it.
The kind of tight control that the republican party has had recently is very new and hasn't really happened before in the US.
The ones that voted for it were all magically the ones that were either not seeking re-election or ones that are not up for election the next term.
This is a hell of a coincidence.
I don't mean to call out the Democrats as the only one who do this (on HN you simultaneously can't point out a party for something because then somehow you're being partisan, but you're also damned if you don't give an example, so it puts you in a tough spot). Just a most recent thing I've noticed.
Up until recently even on HN Schumer was nearly universally damned for letting it happen or being behind it in his capacity as a minority leader. Perhaps without evidence, and perhaps baselessly. But it's telling that as soon as I point it out in a slightly different context, then suddenly it's an opinion worthy of greying out.
>Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, continued to face criticism from members of his own party after he reversed course and allowed the stopgap spending bill to come to a vote.
It's obviously not a coincidence. I don't see how it is any kind of evidence for taking orders from above. People who don't have to face their voters any time soon (or ever) obviously have more leeway on making deals they might not like.
Passing a CR has required 60 votes in the senate since 1974. Despite this, and 60-vote majorities being very rare, shutdowns remained rare and typically very short for a very long time. This was not because the parties got together and made a deal; it was because it was common for senators in both parties to make side deals across the aisle to support their own pet projects. Having the discipline to force the senators of a party to not make such deals is something that only the republicans have managed, and only very recently.
People are angry at the democrats for being weak and a mess, but that is the normal state of affairs in US party politics.
Where "constituents" means "money-weighted interpolation of opinions from constituents, corporations, and politically active non-constituent HNWs alike."
Who exactly would you say is maintaining party discipline?
In 2012, Mitt Romney was at least nominally the leader of the Republican party as their Presidential nominee.
Nowadays, Donald Trump is clearly attempting to maintain party discipline, but I don't think anyone has ever been able to maintain discipline over Donald Trump, not even before he was their President or Presidential nominee.
Your comment reminded me of James Traficant, the former congressman of Ohio. He went to jail for bribery, and then came out of jail suddenly caring about prison inmates. I've seen this in a few other, former elected officials, who have gone to jail.
Some people are incapable of having empathy about an issue or a group of people unless they have a personal connection to that group or issue. You see it in politicians who are anti-gay rights until they have a child who comes out as gay (e.g. Rob Portman).
"As the father of a daughter, I understand the need for feminism that I ignored as a son, brother, playmate, classmate, friend, neighbour, landlord, tenant, lover, teammate, colleague, report, supervisor, and fellow citizen."
That's a particularly icky formulation of personal connection, because it has overtones of paternity as property rights.
> Considering that the top 1% of taxpayers pay more in income taxes than the bottom 90% combined I would say the rich are already taxed.
There are multiple errors of omission in the above statement, I won't address all of them, but the easiest to understand (but unfortunately the least informative) is this:
Individual income taxes provide only 49% of all tax revenue, so you are arguing only about a minority portion of all federal tax revenue. Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%!
The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level.
That omission alone makes your statement look like an attempt to deceive by hiding half of the real numbers.
Medicare tax is uncapped as of several years ago, I thought?
I don't think you can uncap social security without either blowing up the useful fiction that it is (mostly) mandatory old age insurance or uncapping the benefits. Maybe that fiction is going to expire soon anyway.
> Medicare tax is uncapped as of several years ago, I thought?
Yes, it is, but it's taxed far too low relative to its spending given the current healthcare cost structure. As a result, only half of the Medicare costs are funded by the Medicare Trust Fund, the other half is deficit funded.
In other words, unlike the Social Security tax, Medicare isn't self-funding from the Medicare tax because it's set artificially low (or healthcare costs are too high, if you prefer).
> Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%!
The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care; the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway.
> The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level.
You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?
> The corporate income tax rate could be zero for all I care
It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs - this is a consequence of the regulatory fundamentals that have been in place for quite some time.
You'd be amazed how much fiscal policy can fix, even in the current messy state of other regulations.
> You presuppose that it's an unalloyed good to tax someone more if they make more money. Why?
Not always and not at any level, it depends, the devil is in the details as usual.
> It could, but it shouldn't unless your goal is stagnation with a lower standard of living under the control of cartels and oligarchs
I'm seeing no evidence that how much a nation taxes corporations affects its standard of living or political systems one way or another[0]. Norway and Cuba collect similarly high amounts (as a percentage of total tax receipts); the US rubs shoulders the likes of Spain, France, and Finland, as well as Cabo Verde and Tunisia in its relatively low collections.
So for social security - Actually it’s not “the 1% are capped at 1% of their income” but rather capped at the same number, not percentage, as everyone else - which is around 180k per year. That was the argument being made.
re: " the money's taxed when it gets transferred to the actual people that own the corporation, anyway" - not as much as you make it out to be. Large US corporations keep a pile of their profits outside the US. In theory this money would be taxed when it would be re-patriated to their US-based investors. In practice the corporations wait for the next Republican president to pass a tax holiday during which money transferred from outside the US to the US-investors is not taxed. GWB did that, Trump did that in his first term too.
You can make the same argument about the income tax and similarly limit the taxable income from it which will lead to the tax revenue being cut approximately in half.
Also, after Congress raided the Social Security account, they made the point that Social Security is just another tax subject to spending in the general budget.
If that's the case, there are as many arguments for capping/uncapping the FICA taxes as for all other taxes. The problem with such arguments is their appeal to a notion of fairness which has as many faces as economics theories out there - basically a dead end - courtesy of our not-so-diligent economics "science".
So, it's better to use the achievement of better economic, political and social results as the only guidance for fiscal policy, although that requires a level of analysis which far exceeds what mainstream economics has to offer.
Could you please expand on this: "after Congress raided the Social Security account..."? What do you mean by that? AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
> Could you please expand on this: "after Congress raided the Social Security account..."?
I'd ask you, and others reading my previous comment, to scratch this off as a bad choice of words on my part and replace it with:
"by moving to a pay-as-you-go policy for the SSTF, Congress made the point that Social Security is just another tax."
Previously I used "raiding" as a far-fetched metaphor for several different processes which are too complex to discuss here and it would distract from the main point: instead of complex itemization, SSFT & MCFT would be better off as parts of general taxation.
> AFAIK, Social Security contributions stay within the Social Security Fund - they cannot be used by US government to pay its bills.
True in theory, but if we look at how surpluses are handled and how they depend on a manually controlled interest rate we'll see a different reality.
They need to pay more if the US wants to avoid becoming an aristocracy. The top 1%’s share of income is growing rapidly, while the bottom 90%’s share is shrinking.
Lets conceed that what you're saying is true (I didn't check but don't find it unebelievable).
"Percentage of taxes are paid by the top %1" is just one metric, but there's no reason why we should consider it the only criterion.
I would argue that in our world what you said might be true, and at the same time the bottom 90% lives their day to day with the threat that if they disobey their employer, their lives might quickly fall apart, and I would further argue that the latter is more telling about fairness in our society, than "top 1% pays more than bottom 90%"
No for the income tax, when the income tax was introduced in 1913 it was explicitly designed to apply mostly to the rich (off the cuff, I think only a few percent of people paid it for quite some time).
The working poor though earn most their money through wages, which get taxed at the bare minimum 12.4% (payroll + post-payroll SS taxes), and then usually 7-10% sales tax because they are spending all they earn. So the poor are paying 20% tax right off the bat, meanwhile the rich are paying ~20% on capital gains but spending very little of that on sales tax and none on social security. So about the same overall tax rate paid on the earnings of the working poor as the rich.
Social security has always been the main monkey on the back of the working class, to the point the government will literally tax a childless person back into poverty to make sure the quasi-pyramid* scheme is funded. I don't think SS payments are normally recorded in the income tax statistics.
“Tax The Rich At The Same Rate Or Greater Than The Average Rate The Middle Class Are Taxed With” makes for a bad headline, no matter how much clarity it brings to the issue. It’s expected that the top 1% pay the top 99% of taxes in total dollars; that’s how a tax is supposed to work! All that’s needed is to address the unfairness in tax rate; 50% is the tax rate for $250k/year salary, so surely it’s fine to charge a billionaire the same 50% rate on their full earnings (without the ‘unsold gains’ loopholes, offshore holdings, and self-serving trusts exemptions).
I’d rather Romney hadn’t been driven by spite to chime correctly at 12 straight up on the stopped clock, but +1 advocate is still better than +0.
Taking that as true, that doesn't address the actual problem. The US tax code has so many loopholes and specific rules that only ever apply to a handful of people that we might as well be talking about two different sets of laws.
Even calling them "the 1%" is not particularly helpful, because 1% of America is still, like, three and a half million people. These are small business owners and the like; the kinds of people who are well off but still actually doing real productive work. Like, of course they pay the most taxes.
Once you start getting into the 1% of the 1% - "the 0.01%" - then you can afford to hire an accountant who can engineer you a favorable tax situation. And so your tax share starts falling.
But at the level of the 1% of the 0.01% - "the 0.0001%" - you can get custom-designed tax loopholes to favor you and you alone. Because at this level, you're talking about around 348 Americans, all with astronomically high wealth, paying almost no taxes. At this level, the amount of material wealth doesn't even matter; it's all bound up in hypotheticals and illiquid assets. Some of them might be CEOs, or interlocking directors, or politicians. But their real value is all in social capital - their connectedness to other 0.0001%ers who collectively own the economy and can move mountains in their favor.
Right, but you won't receive 8x the benefits that your payroll taxes will eventually pay for, either. In fact, your wife will probably receive a higher percentage of her FICA contributions in eventual SS benefits than you, because there's a slight element of redistribution built in; it's not a straightforward "you get back what you paid into".
For me, the much more concerning part of Social Security is the demographic challenge: the program started out with over 10 workers per retiree and is down to less than three[0]. It doesn't matter how you play with the sliding scales of who pays how much and what the earnings cap is, when in the end it's two to three working people's wages being taxed to support one retiree.
Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.
That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not.
The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0]
The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1]
>> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0]
NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse
ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that.
> Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.
> That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.
Is your reasoning that the amount of household wealth and income at each percentile should hold roughly constant over the years, as if this is some law of physics?
The point is: the absolute values are bad the direction and magnitude of change indicates it is getting worse.
The distribution of wealth is already vastly suboptimal, heavily skewed to the most greedy 0.1%-5%.
When the most wealthy society in the history of the planet still has large portions of its population living one missed paycheck or one illness/accident away from being destitute, or being already destitute, while a few at the top have orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, something is deeply wrong.
The change numbers show this already the case nearly four decades ago, it has gotten worse.
So yes, the glib argument that "the 1% already pay 90% of federal taxes..." is just as spurious as it is vacuous.
Not only does it ignore the reality of wealth and income distribution that the taxation is far below the misallocation, it also ignores the fact that Federal Income Taxes are only a small portion of our total tax burden, and the poor and middle classes pay vastly more of the other taxes such as sales tax, gasoline and road taxes, fees, etc. IOW, you are cherry-picking, and badly.
>>How do you or anyone else know what's optimal and what's misallocated?
Start with basic empathy and a simple sense of fairness.
No one here is saying everything should be even close to equal, and I certainly am not. But as many philosophers have pointed out through the ages, you can see how ethical a society is by how it treats its lowest members.
Seriously. Anyone who fails to see something is deeply wrong, when the most wealthy society in the history of the planet has half of it's people barely scraping by, while a tiny elite hoard orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime, is morally blind.
So start there. When the system is producing this well-documented result, the wealthy are most definitely not paying enough taxes to support the society that enabled them to earn their wealth.
>>Income tax is roughly ...
Yes, and you are appearing to be deliberately obtuse by focusing only on specific federal taxes and ignoring the TOTAL tax burden which is what counts when measuring which people are supporting society and which are extracting more than a fair share. And ignoring the proportion of income and wealth that sector takes vs what they pay in taxes.
When hedge fund managers bringing in $billions and Warren Buffet pay lower rates than their secretaries, something is deeply wrong.
Again, a simple sense or empathy, ethics, and fairness can be your guide. These are evidently foreign concepts to you, and I recommend you look into them.
> when the most wealthy society in the history of the planet has half of it's people barely scraping by
Real median household income has been steadily rising over the past few decades; it's up nearly 20% over the past 20 years[0]. American median disposable income is the highest in the world[1] that isn't a tax haven or a petrostate. Mississippi, often panned for its poverty, has a higher median household income than Germany, often considered the strongest European economy.
Now, you might point out that the CPI gets fudged in a way that doesn't fully capture the costs of living that these figures are adjusted for; I'm sympathetic to that argument, but the numbers are what they are, and the numbers do not support your claim that half of America is "barely scraping by".
> while a tiny elite hoard orders of magnitude more wealth than they can spend in a lifetime
I'm not sure what your operating definition of "hoard" is. There are no Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold coins. The ultra-rich's net worth is based on ownership of companies that often times were founded by them (granted, some people inherit, though not as many in the US as in more egalitarian nations[2]), and is a fictitious figure based on the number of shares they own multiplied by the last-traded price per share. There is no world in which they could actually liquidate those shares to get the number of dollars that are thrown about.
And those companies are almost always publicly traded and owned by heaps of other people, retirement funds for middle-class workers, and whatnot; and generate value to the purchasers of the goods and services they provide. I'm not sure where in this picture comes hoarding.
> Warren Buffet pay lower rates than their secretaries
Warren Buffett paid $23.7M in federal income tax alone over five years[3]. A hypothetical secretary living in Omaha, NE making $300k would have paid $69k in federal income tax in 2025, with another $30k or so in payroll and state taxes. In five years, Buffett paid to the federal treasury alone 237 years worth of income, FICA, and state taxes that this well-paid secretary would have!
Besides, when publications talk about "lower rates" of the ultra-rich, they're always comparing taxes paid on their income against the rise in the valuation of the stock that they own. It's comparing apples and oranges to come up with sensational figures.
> the wealthy are most definitely not paying enough taxes to support the society that enabled them to earn their wealth
The society that is a necessary but not sufficient condition of earning that wealth.
> focusing only on specific federal taxes and ignoring the TOTAL tax burden
Are you claiming that there exist some other taxes through which the working masses are shouldering above their "fair share", whatever that may be, of the burdens of maintaining a functioning society? What taxes are those, exactly? Do you think if you added up all the sales, property, income, FICA, estate, etc. ad nauseam taxes that the average American pays, we'll actually discover that the unsung hero of taxation is someone making $50k a year?
Some estimate that the average American will pay roughly half a million dollars of taxes of all kinds through their lifetime, out of a lifetime earnings of about a million and a half[4]. So Warren Buffett in five years of federal income tax alone (not counting any other taxes he paid) paid as much as almost fifty average people would have over their entire lives in any taxable domain. Jeff Bezos over the same five years, nearly two thousand average lifetimes' worth. To me, it's hard to make the argument that the likes of Buffett and Bezos aren't paying enough.
> a simple sense or empathy, ethics, and fairness can be your guide
Countless millions of people have been immiserated by those preaching empathy and fairness, just in recent history. I prefer to deal in what works in the real world to enrich the lives of the average among us; and as it turns out, systems that let rich people be result in better median outcomes than systems that confiscate and punish.
What is your fair share? Moreover, what is your fair share of what somebody else worked for? How much of the earnings of a waitress, plumber, doctor, Fortune 500 exec, and Elon Musk is due to you, personally, as your empathic, ethical, and fair share?
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