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Originally posted by roneski
OK, time for some perspective. The top 1% of the united states owns more wealth than the entire bottom 95% combined. Say the numbers from your article are accurate. How is it fair that top 1% are only responsible for 1/3 of the tax burden while everyone else picks up the rest?
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-- Abraham Lincoln
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I find it very hard to accept that 95% of our country is owned by the top 1% given that our country is practically built on the middle-class. Sounds like typical class-warfare ideology to me. Since we are discussing income taxes, I think it would be fair though to focus on income.
According to the Census Bureau's report on income in the US for 2002
http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p60-221.pdf, the highest income quintile (top 20%) earned only 49.6% of the country's aggregate income. This percentage drops even more under each of the four alternative income calculations used by the Bureau. I know this doesn't speak specifically to how much wealth is "owned" by a particular group of people, but income tax is charged on income, not wealth, and in any case most wealth held by rich people is further taxed (property tax, capital gains tax, etc).
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