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Originally posted by SM2
David R. Kamerschen, Ph.D.
Professor of Economics
University of Georgia
What this analogy doesn't tell you is that as the amount that each person pays goes up, he also consumes more and more of the beer. So, the guys who pay nothing consume maybe one or two beers; the guys who pay the most consume a couple of six-packs worth.
Figure 5 presents the share of government spending received by each income quintile.
Households in the two lowest income quintiles receive the largest shares of total
government spending, together accounting for 51.4 percent of total spending. This result
is largely driven by spending on government transfer payments to elderly households—
many of whom reside in the lower income quintiles—and other government aid to lowincome
households. Households in the fourth quintile receive the smallest share of total
government spending, at 14.8 percent.
What the analogy also doesn't tell you is that the guy who pays the most has a helpmate that he bribes for a couple of bucks a night, who then finds loopholes in the pricing, and so the guy whose supposed to be paying the most ($49) actually only winds up paying about as much as the guy who pays second most ($18). And then people wonder why the bar is constantly on the verge of closing and having to borrow money.
Wealthier people generally consume more of the nation's resources. Maybe because of this, they should contribute more to the nation; one of the prime ways this is done is by taxes.
People in the top tax bracket would be paying the bulk of the taxes whether we have a flat tax or a progressive tax simply because they make several times (several hundred times in some cases) what your average Joe does.
When somebody's making 500k a year, they're going to pay more in absolute terms than somebody who makes 20k. It's really just basic math that the rich wind up contributing most of the tax dollars. Using that fact to bemoan U.S. tax policies or start warning people that maybe they'll just get sick of it is just lol.