and I was not making any argument other than noting that the top 5% pay more than half of the FEDERAL INCOME TAX.
Federal tax is just one form of tax. It's like quoting statistics for something but only looking at data on Sunday....
The Congressional Budget Office breaks down the 2007 share of the tax burden according to each segment of the population as follows:[19]
The highest quintile in total earned 55.9% of all income. It paid 86.0% of federal income taxes and 68.9% of all federal taxes
The top 1% earned 19.4% of all income. It paid 39.5% of income taxes and 28.1% of all federal taxes
The next 4% earned 12.9% of income. It paid 21.5%. of income taxes and 16.2% of all federal taxes
The next 5% earned 9.7% of income. It paid 11.7% of income taxes and 10.7% of all federal taxes
The next 10% earned 13.9% of income. It paid 13.3% of income taxes and 13.9% of all federal taxes.
The fourth quintile earned 19.3% of income. It paid 12.7% of income taxes and 16.5 of all federal taxes.
The third quintile earned 13.1% of income. It paid 4.6% of income taxes and 9.2% of all federal taxes.
The second quintile earned 8.4%. It paid a net -0.3% of income taxes, meaning in aggregate this quintile received slightly more back in income tax credits than it paid in income taxes. It paid 4.4% of all federal taxes.
The lowest quintile earned 4.0% of all income and received a net -3.0% income tax credits. It paid 1.0% of all federal taxes.
Source: Tax Foundation
That's INCOME, now Wealth:
Income is earned each year and is turned into wealth, which in turn can be used to generate more wealth as demonstrated here:
Now regardless of what you think about taxes, clearly this model is unsustainable.
The Cons and Libertarians gripe about all the benefits paid to low income families and yet those at the top keep increasing their share of the wealth.
The fact is that the top 400 people have more wealth than the bottom 160,000,000 people. The top 400 can't consume enough cars, houses, Washers, TV's, vacations and all the everyday items that people buy to keep the people at the bottom employed.
As a result those at the bottom have to decrease their standard of living.
China has a more balanced distribution of income!!!
http://monthlyreview.org/docs/0705tbl3-4.pdf
The bottom line is that people need money to buy things from those at the top that want to supply it. As income becomes more uneven more and more people are limited to necessities the discretionary income becomes increasingly limited. In turn those industries that furnish items other than food, gas, clothing, housing, electricity, water ect will see decreased demand leading to inevitable layoffs only exacerbating the problem.
When a super wealthy individual buys a 10 million dollar Van Gogh, how many people does that employ? Think about it.
No matter how you look at this problem and where you point the finger, it is the increasing share of income and wealth in the top 20% that is creating the problem (not that I blame the top 20% for trying to make it mind you). People at the bottom have, since 1983, had less and less money to spend, leading to fewer jobs and less money to spend. To some degree this has been made up though an increase in credit, which has increasingly made those at the bottom slaves to their debt and in turn to their low wage jobs, that, for the bottom 50% have been decreasing in pay since the 1980's.