The Truth About the American Tax System
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Taxes and fair share. One of the things that drives me absolutely berserk is these folks out there that are always saying, the rich people don’t pay their fair share. We gotta make sure they’re paying their fair share, fair share, fair share, fair share. And they never define. In all my years, I’ve never heard a single big lib define fair share, what it is. Bernie Sanders, where you at? Elizabeth Warren, where you at?
What’s fair share? I made this suggestion years and years and years ago, was on Thom Hartman’s radio show, it was a big left-wing radio show. I don’t even know if he’s on the air anymore, quite frankly, but you appear on his program, the nasty emails and threats I would get in my email box, neither here nor there. I said this, okay, why don’t we start defining fair share? Why don’t we do it by time?
I want you to tell me, want all you left is to tell me how many months, weeks, hours, days, how many do I get to keep for myself over the course of the year? And how many months, days, weeks, hours do I have to work to send money to the authoritize? Yeah.
to send it to Washington DC. Just let me know.
Just let me know. I’m curious to see what you deem is fair. Anyway, years ago, I’m talking years ago, wow, February 2003, I put out a piece called The Truth About Taxes. And basically what I did at the time, again, this is 2003, this is George W. Bush, President of the United States.
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tried to put the tax cuts that Bush was trying to put through, I tried to put them into a way, the way that people could understand them. So basically what we did is we took a restaurant bill. I’m do little scenes from Italian restaurant, Billy Joel here. 10 men goes to dinner. I know I simplified this. 10 men go to dinner, $100 bill. And what I did was they paid the bill. The 10 men paid the bill the way that we divvy up taxes.
here in the United States, it would look like this. This is 2003, mind you. First four men would pay nothing. The fifth would pay a dollar, the sixth would pay three, the seventh seven, the eighth 12, the ninth 18, and the 10th man, the richest of them all was gonna pay $59. So that’s what they did. Every single day, 10 men go out to dinner, restaurant, that’s how the bill was divvied up.
Then all of a sudden, the owner of the restaurant decided to throw a curveball. He you guys are such great customers. You guys are such great customers. What we’re going to do is we’re going to, I’m going to cut your bill by 20 bucks. It’s going to be $80. how are we going to divvy up this? Okay. Again, you can’t divide 20. Okay. You can’t divide 20 by six. That’s $3.33. Certain people would end up getting paid.
end up getting paid for having dinner. Hold that thought in your mind because that’s actually, people end up getting paid here in this country too and they don’t pay any taxes. Anyway, the restaurant order suggested he would reduce each man’s bill by roughly the same amount and this is how it went. The fifth man is now paying nothing, the sixth that was paying three is paying two, the seventh paid five rather than seven, the eighth paid nine.
rather than 12, the ninth 12 rather than 18. And the 10th man was down to $52 rather than $59. Now each person at the table was better off than they were before, aside from the people who weren’t paying anything anyway. But of course, of course it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair, right? my God, the rich get all the breaks.
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Wow, how did the guy, the rich guy get the most amount of money back? That’s not fair. That’s not right. And they all got into a huge argument and a fight outside the restaurant. Sound familiar? Well, I’m going to fast forward. mean, this is George W. Bush tax cuts, February 2003. Right now, know, Congress is debating whether or not they are going to debate the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Let me just put this in a perspective for you.
Okay. And just say how progressive our tax code actually is at this point in time. Again, I simplified it in 2003. We did it with 10. Okay. You can’t even do it. It’s become so progressive, you have to factor in the top. So we’d have to have a restaurant deal with 100 people going out to dinner. And the top 1%, 1 % here in this country.
provided 40 % of income tax revenue. One, 1%, okay? One out of 100 people paid 40 % of the bill. You wanna go to 10 %?
72 % in 2003 prior to the Bush tax cuts. Okay, it was 59 % of the entire bill. It’s 72 % now.
What’s fair? I’m just curious, inquiring minds want to know, should the top 10 % in the country, unless you are a top 10 % or should you pay nothing in income tax, contribute nothing at all? I don’t know, I guess maybe that’s what some people want. I’m curious to see what your justification is. For all of you people that think that,
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The rich are not paying their fair share. Well, okay, what’s fair? What’s fair? No one has ever been able to define it for me. Watchdogonwallstreet.com.
