That's EXTREMELY deceptive. They pay that much of INCOME tax, it's just to bad there are a lot more taxes people pay than that. When one adds what they pay in taxes per the money they make they don't really pay anymore than most people and very very often pay a lot less. That's why Warren Buffet can correctly claim he pays less taxes per dollar he makes than his secretary.
It's not like some rich guy goes to the store and buys and item and pays 5,000 percent the sales tax that any other person does because he makes 50 times more than the average person, they don't pay any more tax for gas, they don't pay as much on what they make on what they earn for things like social security, the tax rates on businesses are low, the tax rates on what people make from stocks is very low, they have more methods both shady and sadly legal to shelter themselves from taxes that normal people don't have often not paying taxes at all for all practical purposes. They can afford to same up money unlike people living paycheck to paycheck allowing them to shelter it in away from taxes in a manner most average people can't. Almost every tax people pay anymore is regressive and hurts poor people more, with the exception of income taxes which is almost often cited in a deceptive way by people that like to side with the rich for some reason.
As to where I draw the line where somebody is rich...I don't. That's why there should be a realistic ever increasingly higher tax burden the further one goes on the resources and wealth ladder. The more somebody can reasonably pay the more they should.
In any case in regards to people here that complain they shouldn't pay or more or even more laughable notion that they "deserve" it. Most rich people are rich because of luck more than any other factor. Either because of being born in the right place at the right time to the right people or having a fortuitous situation happen to them when they needed it. I could probably find thousands if not millions of people that work just as hard, are just as capable of learning, and have just as much talent, if not skill, that are a lot poorer though no fault of their own and through circumstances out of their control.
Furthermore, most of the rich have gotten rich off the exploitation of people poorer than them and the utilization of the society they live in, or at least they inherited from somebody that did, with very few exceptions. They got even richer by having access to politicians and practically being able to write the laws they wanted (like the tax code) to benefit them themselves, all while milking the society they came from, not to mention utilizing near de facto like slave conditions in other places in the world when the people here became to expensive for them to the detriment of almost everybody else.
So no, they don't deserve it. Still I could point to the fact they should give more because they are the most capable of doing so with it hurting them the least. It's part of the duty they have to society.
For example, if there was a war and our country was about the get invaded, we wouldn't draft old grandmas, and the sick to go fight the war, we would use young healthy men capable for fighting because THEY ARE THE MOST CAPABLE OF FULFILLING SOCIETY'S NEED AND DUTY FOR THEM WITH THE LEAST AMOUNT OF HARDSHIP. It's as simple as that in that regard. The way our society operates now in how it treats people economically is metaphorically the equivalent of sending the old women and handicap out to fight the battle of people trying to invade us.
Still, I can even argue that in times decades past when we taxes both the rich and corporations a lot more than we did now we were at our height economically. It was also the time of the growing middle class, economic stability, and our dominance in the world's economy. So to actually think that somehow now when taxes are lower than they have been in decades and we are falling apart economically, and the middle class is disappearing, and our society is falling apart that it will somehow hurt us if we tax the rich like we used to is utter nonsense.
Along with that we need to actually punish the elite and corporations that act selfishly. We need to get rid of the type of globalization we have now. We have to quite being afraid of the "socialist bogyman" just because of blind ideology that opposed to it that doesn’t make any sense. We need to realize their are businesses, like healthcare and medicine, for example that should never be treated like normal businesses and should probably be controlled by the government as a non-profit to keep cost low and ethical. We need to have those that most gained and most exploited the society they live in, not to mention other people societies and resources, pay more not only because it's their duty but because it's plain the right thing to do. We need laws that are tailored to benefit the most people in society and not be practically written by an elite few to benefit themselves at the expense of everybody else.
with the power to veto the policy that gets passed (but really how many of those do they use...bush used 11 i think and obama has used 2 i believe), the presidents real power lies with his appointment powers...particularly when they get to do those supreme court ones
