The Rich

I read a fascinating blog about the rich getting uber rich in the last few decades while, simultaneously, their tax burden is smaller. Sounds like a good gig for them. Unfortunately that means the rest of us are making less money and paying higher tax rates.

Billionaire Warren Buffet, one of the world's richest men, has famously explained how he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. It is simply wrong that the richest people are not paying the highest tax rates, that is core principle of a progressive system of taxation.

A snippet:

So there you have it. The top 400 taxpayers, a group so rich and elite that I'd need scientific notation to properly represent their proportion of the population, have doubled their share of income in the past decade or two but have decreased their tax burden by nearly half. Nice work! As you can see, Warren Buffet wasn't exaggerating when he said his secretary paid a higher tax rate than he does. If she pays more than 18% — not exactly a tough hurdle when you figure that payroll taxes already account for about 8% of that — she probably does.

That's absurd.