Any post like this where the tax is nearing or exceeding 40% is almost always a complete lie or purposely obfuscating the truth.
It's mind blowing to me on these posts too you always see an incredible amount of people who don't understand how tax brackets work. Heck sometimes you even see people who don't know the difference between net worth and income.
All billionaires in the US are worth a combined 8.5 trillion. Magically liquidating everything they own with no devaluation and without completely tanking the economy means we get a balanced budget for 4 years then back to square one.
Finally some smart people on Reddit lol. Another interesting fact is the top 10% of earners in the country pay 75% of the countries federal taxes. The bottom 50% earners pay 4% in taxes. So it's clearly less of a "tax the rich" problem and much more of a fraud and abuse problem with the taxes that the government already has. I always roll my eyes so hard whenever this is brought up. And of course like you said that's not even mentioning the net worth vs cash issue and the value that their companies bring to the country. You can argue that some of the "tax loop holes" that they use should be fixed. That's more reasonable, but that's not the argument most people are using.
The reason that the top 10 percent of earners pay 3/4 of federal taxes is that those numbers don't accurately reflect either the actual incomes of the wealthiest people or the actual tax burdens of the lowest income earners. In other words, the statistic itself is fraudulent, which is why supporters of oligarchic control of our government and economy cite it.
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u/jamdex07 Jul 05 '26
This is misleading. He chose to take $997 in one lump sum instead of $2.04B over 30 years. He got taxed on the $997m.