you were the one that said you believed in tax equality
Correct.
and I showed that is what we have, with the upper incomes actually paying a bit more then their income says they should
.
Incorrect. You did not address the decreased tax rate for the top income earners, the payroll tax, the tax loopholes or the business deductions for corporations that have been provided.
Now you are saying that is not tax equality, and this should be kicked back up to the 70 to 80% bracket, that would in no way shape or form be tax equality. So to say you want tax equality, certainly isn't the truth. I guess you will have to explain to me how a progressive tax that we still have is regressive.
"Over the last 60 years, the U.S. tax code has dramatically shifted away from corporate taxes and toward taxes on individuals, especially through the payroll tax, the financing backbone of Social Security and Medicare.
In the 1950s, the corporate income tax brought in, on average, one of every four dollars in federal tax revenues. By the 2000s, however, it raised just one of every 10 tax dollars.
The shrinking share of corporate taxes was made up by an increase in payroll taxes to fund social insurance and retirement programs. Excise and other taxes—such as fuel taxes, phone taxes, etc.—shrank as well over the last 60 years, while the individual federal income tax rose slightly, from an average of 43% of total federal revenue in the 1950s to 46% in the 2000s.
This shift is important because of who pays these different taxes. The corporate income tax is significantly more progressive than other taxes. Those with incomes in the top 20% of the income distribution (those making more than about $86,000 a year in 2007) pay four times the average tax rate on corporate income than the middle 20% (those making between $27,000 and $48,000); while, for the payroll tax, those in the top 20% actually pay less than those in the middle as a share of their income.1
This shift has been one of the factors leading to the drop in average federal tax rates for the very highest earners. Between 1960 and 2004, the average tax rate has fallen by about 14 percentage points (from 44.4% to 30.4%) for the top 1% of earners (those making more than $435,000 in 2007), while it has increased slightly (from 15.9% to 16.1%) for those in the middle 20%. 2
Without offsets, further erosion of corporate tax revenues—either through lower statutory tax rates or through special preferences—would expand the already wide and growing income inequality in the United States.
http://www.epi.org/economic_snapshots/entry/webfeatures_snapshots_20080409/"
you know you really should read down the page further rather then cherry pick from your own sites...
Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power
in 1982, that would be the very start of the downfall right ?? when the Reagan tax cuts took over.
In 1983 the top 1 percent owned a total net worth of the wealth, of 33.8%.... in 2007 they owned 34.6 an increase of .8 percent over 24 years,
in 1983 the top 1 percent owned 42.9% of the financial wealth, in 2007 they owned 42.7% of the financial wealth or a “drop” of .2% over 24 years.
now from the site you provided, just scroll down to the charts, one could only say that the top 1 percent, with a 50% cut in their tax rate, really haven't added a damn thing to their wealth. kind of blows another hole in your theory doesn't it ? -chuckles- and waits for the next yeah but
What I posted before was their conclusions from the study as a whole. What you are doing above is cherry picking. Again, from their conclusions:
Here are some dramatic facts that sum up how the wealth distribution became even more concentrated between 1983 and 2004, in good part due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and the defeat of labor unions: Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, fully 42% of it went to the top 1%. A whopping 94% went to the top 20%, which of course means that the bottom 80% received only 6% of all the new financial wealth generated in the United States during the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s (Wolff, 2007)."
"And now we have arrived at the point I want to make. If the top 1% of households have 30-35% of the wealth, that's 30 to 35 times what we would expect by chance, and so we infer they must be powerful. And then we set out to see if the same set of households scores high on other power indicators (it does). Next we study how that power operates, which is what most articles on this site are about. Furthermore, if the top 20% have 84% of the wealth (and recall that 10% have 85% to 90% of the stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity), that means that the United States is a power pyramid. It's tough for the bottom 80% -- maybe even the bottom 90% -- to get organized and exercise much power."
"And the rate of increase is even higher for the very richest of the rich: the top 400 income earners in the United States. According to another analysis by Johnston (2010a), the average income of the top 400 tripled during the Clinton Administration and doubled during the first seven years of the Bush Administration. So by 2007, the top 400 averaged $344.8 million per person, up 31% from an average of $263.3 million just one year earlier. (For another recent revealing study by Johnston, read "Is Our Tax System Helping Us Create Wealth?").
How are these huge gains possible for the top 400? It's due to cuts in the tax rates on capital gains and dividends, which were down to a mere 15% in 2007 thanks to the tax cuts proposed by the Bush Administration and passed by Congress in 2003. Since almost 75% of the income for the top 400 comes from capital gains and dividends, it's not hard to see why tax cuts on income sources available to only a tiny percent of Americans mattered greatly for the high-earning few. Overall, the effective tax rate on high incomes fell by 7% during the Clinton presidency and 6% in the Bush era, so the top 400 had a tax rate of 20% or less in 2007, far lower than the marginal tax rate of 35% that the highest income earners (over $372,650) supposedly pay. It's also worth noting that only the first $106,800 of a person's income is taxed for Social Security purposes (as of 2010), so it would clearly be a boon to the Social Security Fund if everyone -- not just those making less than $106,800 -- paid the Social Security tax on their full incomes."
Who Rules America: Wealth, Income, and Power