Comment by busterarm
4 hours ago
The top 1% of NYC residents contribute 40-48% of all personal income tax collected in NYC. When you extend that to Top 2.5% you cross 51%.
Personal Income Tax accounts for around 31% of collected NYC tax revenue.
"The rich" also pay property tax. NYC's poorer residents generally don't have property to pay tax on. Everyone pays sales tax equally.
So how exactly are the ultra rich paying "less taxes"?
This claim is often repeated but simply misleading. Taxable income is only a tiny fraction of the wealth of ultra rich folks - many even take symbolic wages, because their real compensation happens in stock, which they can use to lend effectively infinite money. There's a great episode of the Ezra Klein Show on this topic too[0].
[0]: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Jjy4drElYHNMRtxVQPENR?si=5...
I'm someone who uses the same "loophole" the wealthy use to "avoid" paying taxes. Turns out you really only need around ~$100k to unlock it, and you still will pay ~0.5% interest over the overnight lending rate. But it's about as rock bottom as any non-united-states-government will get a dollar denominated loan for.
But it is not a tax dodging scheme. It's a tax deferral scheme wrapped in a risk-on loan package, that is used almost entirely to maintain ownership of a company rather than to defer taxes. On smaller scales you can use it to unlock money tied up in stocks, if you think the stock will keep going up (if the stock falls, you now might get margin called as well as coming out worse then just getting a regular loan).
That does not address the point. You say they should pay even more to address the idea that very few people pay most of the taxes, what is the logic here?
You're insisting on shifting framing to percentage of tax collected. That's irrelevant to the fairness question of percentage of income paid as taxes. The insane imbalance where the rich end up paying half of all taxes while simultaneously paying a fraction of their proportional wealth in taxes only highlights the massive difference in personal wealth. Taxing that at a higher rate only seems unfair if you take the view that all wealth is earned fairly and any attempt at altering the market's allocation of wealth is against the natural order.
I'm not. I'm saying that the numbers OP stated were misleading. They refer to people with a high income - surgeons, laywers, or engineers -, but not the ultra rich, which don't have a high income in the first place, or it's a tiny slice of their cash flow, while the majority of it is made via non-taxable or low-taxed income streams.
Which means that a lot of people pay a proportionally high percentage of their income, while the Epstein class pays effectively none. That's the logic here.
Because wealth is also distributed in a very lumpy way across the city.
154 residents of NYC own 33% of the entire wealth of the city... notice I didn't say 1%, I said top 154. They are not contributing 33% of the tax income to the city.
So yes, the ultra rich pay "less taxes" if you look at how much of the resident wealth they control.
Also, property taxes are significantly lower than appraised value and the richer you get the bigger the disparity. That Ken Griffin’s $238M penthouse pied-a-terre? It's assessed value is $9M. So yea, he's paying like $150k/yr in property taxes.
And finally, it is a known fact that sales tax definitely hits poor people harder (re: "everyone pays sale tax equally"). What you want to look at is what percentage of a person's post taxincome vs sales tax paid, because if you make like $60k/yr you're probably close to 60% of all post tax income paying some form of sales tax (you buy with all the money you make). If you have $2B, your percentage of "tax paid as sales tax" is significantly lower, because you don't typically spend a billion dollars the same way you spend $60k.
Wealth distribution is a false flag. Rain distribution across the globe is not equal, solar light distribution is not equal and they impact people's life more than wealth distribution. USA and the entire planet's population is at record high in living standards and wealth, but some people are still unhappy because not everything is perfectly equal and at zero entropy like the thermal death of the universe: this is more than illogical, it is just envy without limits.
Imagine 1.6% of the earth receiving nearly 50% of all sunlight, and 82% of the earth only receiving 12% of all precipitation.
If rain distribution and solar light distribution were even half as unequal as wealth distribution, our global ecosystem would collapse.
A false flag to what?
1 reply →
Surely you know this, but the rich are paying less percentage taxes relative to the money they have.
I'm familiar with the concept of crabs in a bucket, yes. That's why I left New York and abandoned my rent controlled apartment to do so.
Oh shit, I didn’t realize the billionaires who can have multiple homes in Manhattan are crabs in the same bucket as us.
Luckily the law is much more egalatarian and bars the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges or stealing bread.
3 replies →
Voters don't feel like it's a fair deal. Telling voters that their concerns aren't real is a losing strategy.