But they are making my point for me nevertheless, God bless 'em.
Washington Post
... Consider: There were 30,382 tax filers with incomes of $10 million or more in 2023, the latest year IRS data is available.
That includes all sources of income. This tiny group of people, less
than 0.02 percent of all tax filers and 10,000 fewer than fit into
Nationals Park, made 5.9 percent of all income — and paid 10.9 percent
of all income taxes. ...
[Please note that in 2023 there were just 5,212 individual wage earners making more than $10 million. The other 25,000 DON'T WORK, because at these levels work is only for chumps.]
The
upper-middle class is where more of the less-taxed money is located.
Filers with incomes between $100,000 and $500,000 make 49.7 percent of
taxable income, yet they pay just 43 percent of all income taxes.
This
fact is tremendously inconvenient for revenue-hungry politicians in a
country where tens of millions of people are upper-middle class, and
even more people want to become upper-middle class. Republicans promise
not to raise income taxes on anyone, and Democrats promise not to raise
income taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 — which is almost
everyone. ...
The original $3,000 personal exemption for a single wage earner [eliminated by Trump in 2017] from the first income tax code in 1913, when the average Joe made about $800, would be $101,085.61 in March 2026. For the married filing jointly the personal exemption was $4,000, or $134,780.82 today.
NO ONE making up to those limits today should be paying any federal income tax.
In 2023 that's about 85% of individual wage earners not paying any federal income tax. The 15% making more than 100K numbered about 28 million in 2023. Tax them.
Let these "rich" duke it out over who pays what, as this column suggests, and Make America Great Again.