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...

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AdrianB1 an hour ago | parent [-]

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?

	▲	idle_zealot 40 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	9dev 42 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.