> 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?
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.
> 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.
As far as I know there are quite a few loopholes to be exploited which don't trigger a taxable event, loans using assets as collateral is one of them but there are a bunch of other nice holes that creative and well paid accountants/lawyers find if you have enough money for their services.
> 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.
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.
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.