I'm not sure "top 10%" is all that useful of a grouping. In the table you present, $178,611 is the income split point, defined as "the minimum AGI for tax returns to fall into each percentile". $178k does not make you rich in almost any part of the US. You're not struggling if you live in a low cost of living area, but treating these folks the same as your Pichai, Ellison, Bezos, Cook, etc. is severely misleading to me. I think that's a core problem with our current tax bracketing -- seven just isn't enough for the absolutely massive income spread of American workers.
You didn't mention them by name. You mentioned the top 10%, which naturally includes everyone I named. It also includes folks making $178k MAGI.
You said "... why do people believe the rich don't pay their fair share when the top 10% pay almost 3/4 of the taxes... "
I'm suggesting talking about the top 10% is misleading because when people talk about the rich not paying their fair share, they're not talking about the master electrician in your home town that broke $180k working overtime. You conflated the rich with the top 10%, but your grouping includes a whole lot of people that most of us wouldn't consider rich.
To answer your question about why people believe the rich don't pay their fair share, you either need to look at a different figure than the top 10% (which invalidates the 3/4 of the taxes portion) or you need to say everyone (including married couples filing jointly) making $178k MAGI is rich. I don't think people at large agree with the latter, so the rest of your question is premised on the wrong set of numbers. That may answer the question you posed initially.
my point stands even if you use top 1% or top 0.1%. no matter what you use for [income tax], the group size and revenue generated in income taxes by them will be far disproportionate. this is an inherent property of the distribution.
Yes, but it's OK for the top 0.1% to shoulder a greater than 0.1% of the burden.
Why?
Because that enormously expensive army we're maintaining is protecting mostly their stuff. Setting aside the fact that, say, poor people, have no money; why should the poor pay an equivalent share to protect the wealthy person's property?
Yes, you implicitly did, because the top 10% definitionally includes the top 1% (and the top 0.01%).
I'm not really sure what you're trying to argue for/against here. Yes, people in the top 10% of income-earners collectively pay the majority of income taxes, dollar for dollar, and yes, we've been hearing variants of what Jonathan Chait called "The Stat" for years: the highest-earning 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all income taxes.[1] As Chait points out, "'The Stat' is literally true, but it is deeply misleading." For instance, FICA is not a progressive tax; it's a flat tax that stops being collected at around at around $150K of income. Somebody making $80K pays way, way, way more FICA as a percentage of their income as somebody making $800K does.
While I'm not suggesting we need a wealth tax, start burning down mansions, etc., etc., it's at least worth considering the possibility that America has a tax system which disproportionately favors the wealthy. That multimillionaires and billionaires pay, dollar for dollar, more taxes than the shift manager of your local Jersey Mike's does is not some kind of slam-dunk argument against said possibility.
what exactly is your point, are you suggesting the data is wrong? if the link had a 0.1% bracket it would show that the even smaller group pays an even higher percentage of the total income tax revenue relative to their size.
I'm suggesting that the dichotomy is "earns wages from labor" vs "earns income from assets". The difference of someone on the 2nd decile vs someone on the 1st decile is that the former looks at the price on the supermarket while the later doesn't need to. But the difference between someone on the top 1 percentile and the top 0.1 percentile is much starker.
> if the link had a 0.1% bracket it would show that the even smaller group pays an even higher percentage of the total income tax revenue relative to their size.
That's exactly the point: in absolute values, if you have a lot of concentration of wealth, those will come out to be most of the tax base. That doesn't mean that proportionally they are paying the same. As a matter of fact, someone that makes 100k being taxed 20% is actually more onerous than someone that makes 1M being taxed 20%. This is why most countries try to have a progressive tax system.
