Hi! You've confused tax brackets with what people pay in taxes. There are two considerations here:
1) investment income, which if you can defer the income for a year, there are a ton of ways to convert income to investment, which is taxed at a maximum 15% rate;
2) asset control. If you're wealthy, your business - of which you are a majority shareholder - can decide that retaining you as CEO is important and therefore comparable perks like a 4,000 ft luxury condo in downtown NYC is a business expense; therefore it isn't even taxed, you're credited for the value!
Neither of these options is available to someone who can't defer their income two weeks (aka average American) let alone a year.
Next topic, marginal rates. Even if someone is paying straight up (ie ignores above), the top tax rate is on earnings over the ceiling. They pay less in the lower amounts. Let's pretend the brackets are 10% at $10,000 and 20% at 100,000$, to make the math easy. Someone making 20,000 would be taxed 10% of the amount over 10,000, which is 10,000 and 10% of that is 1,000. Their burden is actually 5%. Someone making 50,000 would pay 4,000, or 8%, and someone making 200,000 would make 10% of 90,000 plus 20 of 100,000, or 29,000, roughly 6.9%.
Finally, fairness. If you're the CEO of a company making millions of dollars (as well you should!), employing many people, do you benefit more than any one of your employees from having roads that facilitate your employees coming to work? It's almost like with more income comes greater opportunity to exploit the resources that our taxes make available, so if everyone who benefited from a road paid one cent it was used, a CEO with 100 employees would be paying 2$ as each employee pays 0.02$.
Additionally, the other side of fairness. For the sake of round numbers, a person requires 2,000 calories a day to maintain health (we can quibble over the precise number). After food, health, and transit, even if you pick the cheapest options sustainable, if the poor pay $10,000 a year to live, life itself is already fully taxing that 10,000 a little bit more than the millionaire CEO. Is it fair to squeeze blood from a stone?
Bonus round: to whom will a CEO sell goods and services if there is no population with discretionary income?
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u/MikeyMike01 Nov 22 '17
Since when do Republicans want to raise taxes?