Here is the tricky thing... a progressive tax rate
is an equitable tax rate setup. Everyone pays the same for the first $15k, then $30k, then $100k (however the brackets are set up).
Bernie's concept of equality, again to my surprise, seems to be that if you earn more money you are liable for a greater proportion. That is how it is today, but when speaking of a reduction in rate, I feel that reduction should be equal across the board for all.
The top 1% took in 19% of the income in
2013.
The top 1%
earned took home $1,715 billion dollars in 2013. That same group paid $465 billion in taxes. Let's do some division... that turns out to be an effective tax rate of 27%. Now I ask... is that number really too high? The highest tax rate in the US is 39.6%... but the effective tax rate on the top 1% who took in nearly $1 in every $5 taken home in America was 27%. Also 1.3 million people in that top percent, meaning an average take home of $1.3 million (how is that for a coincidence, irrelevant, but interesting).
Now the Tax Foundation holds back on some info. Let's look at the bottom 50%. They paid an effective tax rate of just 3.3%, which is 8 times less that the top 1%. OMFG right? Not really. That bottom 50%, if we do a little math, took in $1,043 billion home. That'd be 64% of what the top 1% took home. Of course, the bottom 50% also consists of 69.1 million people, an average of $15,094 per person.
Now we get to the good part. Let's go equal and see that it would mean shit. If you taxed the bottom of 50% at the same effective tax rate, you'd raise $281 billion, instead of $34 billion. That's right, if you octupled the effective tax rate of the bottom 50% of taxpayers (as in increase the tax rate of 69.1 million people by 800%), you'd only rate $250 billion more, increasing the total collected income tax revenue for the nation by just 20%.
So as a review, the bottom 50% (69.1 million people) averages an individual income of $15,000. Which is why asking them to provide an equitable percentage to the income tax cofffers wouldn't do much to help increase the coffers and would clearly take away money they desperately need to do things like... eat. When the top 1% takes home $1 in every $5 in income (is that 1 in 100 really doing 20% of the nation's work?!), yeah, they damn well better expect to be paying more in taxes. And an effective rate of 27% is not high.