When people are talking about "the rich not paying their fair share", it is typically about the income class that makes most of the income not from "working", but from "owning" (capital gains, profit from owned assets). This is exacerbated by the fact that those kinds of incomes are often taxed less (percentage-wise) than peoples salaries.
The cutoff for this is probably more in the top 1 to 0.1% range.
This notion is not something that only poor communists subscribe to (out of selfinterest/delusion), see e.g.
this doesn't really make any sense. forget billionaries - look at the bottom 50% compared to the cut off to be in the top 10%. The person in the top 10% making a mere 180K pays an order of magnitude more taxes.
of course, this is how a progressive tax system works inevitably. thus, my point and question is, how are rich people not already paying their fair share? by all data available with respect to [income taxes], they already pay a ton, no?
> I say this in terms of value to society. Is having some extremely, extremely rich individuals of value to the US?
yes. restated, is it good or bad that the USA has rich people? clearly it is good. if it were bad, then there would be evidence that countries with no rich people are better, but there is no such evidence.
> yes. restated, is it good or bad that the USA has rich people? clearly it is good. if it were bad, then there would be evidence that countries with no rich people are better, but there is no such evidence.
That's not the question. Having rich people is one thing; having extremely, extremely rich people is another. We're talking about people that are worth the entire annual economic output of entire medium-sized metropolitan areas of the US and Canada, not the guy you knew from college who became director of sales at a software vendor and lives in a neighborhood with a golf course.
Obviously does not follow. It’s like saying that torrential rains that flood your home are actually a good thing, because having no rain at all would be worse. Most things are best in moderation.
A "fair" share is in my view (at least) a fixed percentage.
I'm not sure what "fairness" means to you? A fixed amount, per capita?
Would you then throw everyone not making the cut into some kind of debtors prison, or working camp?
I'd argue that income is a decent enough proxy for how much utility a person derives from tax expenditures: Just protecting that income would be pretty much exactly proportional in a full anarcho/wild-west civilisation (can see this in unstable countries, where you often have a scale between "have to regularly pay off someone" to "need a private militia" to keep your gains).
The cutoff for this is probably more in the top 1 to 0.1% range.
This notion is not something that only poor communists subscribe to (out of selfinterest/delusion), see e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffett_Rule