From that article, the top quintile paid an average rate (not their marginal rate, of course!) of 25.1% of their income in federal taxes, and that these payments made up 68.9% of all federal income taxes. A little arithmetic there shows that if you upped their federal taxes by 50%, they'd lose 12.5% of their gross, and that would cover 100% of the revenue currently generated by federal personal income taxes. So if you wanted to tax the rich and not tax the poor, and by "tax" you mean "federal income tax", it's hugely doable!
If you're wondering how much of total federal revenue is personal income tax, it appears to be around 40% to 50%.
So that means that the 25.1% of income paid by the top quintile makes up 0.68*0.42 == 28.5% of federal revenue. It's pretty clear that if you kept the second-to-top quintile taxed as they are now (12% of federal revenue), cut payroll taxes in half (to say 20% of federal revenue), and kept the non-tax revenue (roughly 10%), that the remaining 58% could be met by slightly-worse-than-doubling the taxes on the rich.
Again. Double taxes on the richest quintile, keep taxes as they are on the next richest quintile, halve payroll taxes, and keep non-taxes, and you're done. You can set corp taxes to zero, and also income taxes for the bottom 60% to zero.
So. If you want to tax just the richest 1%, you can't run the country on that. But you absolutely can run the country just by taxing the rich. If you wanted to.
(Note: this was a thought experiment, not advocacy. I am not a fan of this proposal. I just want to demonstrate that videos like the one I've seen, saying it's impossible to just tax the rich, are using shaky math.)
So, the thing is, I can't reply to the comment you wish you had written. You said "the rich", I think it's pretty clear that the top quintile (collectively earning more than the rest of the country put together) are rich. I'd say they're "the rich", even. I know, I know, people in the 99th percentile think they're middle-class because they can't maintain three houses and a jet, but they're stupid and crazy to think that.
BUT ACTUALLY, even your completely ludicrously irrelevant claim is still false!
The top 1%, earning nearly 20% of income, got taxed at 29.5% in 2007, which made up 28.1% of federal individual income taxes. Obviously if you crank that to 100%, and cut all other forms of government revenue, you can run the country for, uh...
1/0.295 * 0.281 = 95.25% of 2007 total individual income taxes
0.9525 * 40% or so of total federal 2007 revenue = 38%
Looks to me like the budget deficit is under 24%, that is 901B / 3803B (figures according to requested budget for FY2013, which is obviously complicating things since my previous numbers are from 2007, but I'm attempting to take the worst-of-both-worlds to make my claim as hard-to-prove as possible).
0.38 * 2.902/3.803 = 29%
0.29 365 = about 105 days. 3.5 months.
If you taxed the top 1% at 100% (but no wealth tax), and you cut ALL OTHER FORMS of government revenue, including corporate tax, payroll taxes, fees, businesses, everything.... AND you won't let me use the same deficit spending that the current real-life government uses.... AND you take wealth distributions from 2007 (which is less extreme than today, but better-documented) and combine it with the insane spending habits of this year (i.e. worst-of-both-worlds).... you can STILL run the federal government for more than a quarter of the year.
So any claim that taxing the top 1% at 100% will only last the government for a few days is... guess what.... totally bullshit. Let's try to have a fact-based discussion, instead of just quoting completely-preposterous hearsay that some wingnut blogger posted.
Note, again, that the reason all this math works, of course, is that the rich already pay most of the taxes (nearly half of fed indv inc paid by the top 5%). That, in turn, is due to a very-mildly-progressive tax schedule, combined with absolutely insane income distribution.
(aside to intended: no one should be discussing this, exactly as you said, but I won't let that stop me!!! bwahaha!)
Thought experiment time.
Look at http://www.cbo.gov/publication/42870 (which is discussing 2007, so if you can find a more-up-to-date source, I'd love that).
From that article, the top quintile paid an average rate (not their marginal rate, of course!) of 25.1% of their income in federal taxes, and that these payments made up 68.9% of all federal income taxes. A little arithmetic there shows that if you upped their federal taxes by 50%, they'd lose 12.5% of their gross, and that would cover 100% of the revenue currently generated by federal personal income taxes. So if you wanted to tax the rich and not tax the poor, and by "tax" you mean "federal income tax", it's hugely doable!
If you're wondering how much of total federal revenue is personal income tax, it appears to be around 40% to 50%.
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/background/numb...
http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/fed_revenue_2007USrn
So that means that the 25.1% of income paid by the top quintile makes up 0.68*0.42 == 28.5% of federal revenue. It's pretty clear that if you kept the second-to-top quintile taxed as they are now (12% of federal revenue), cut payroll taxes in half (to say 20% of federal revenue), and kept the non-tax revenue (roughly 10%), that the remaining 58% could be met by slightly-worse-than-doubling the taxes on the rich.
Again. Double taxes on the richest quintile, keep taxes as they are on the next richest quintile, halve payroll taxes, and keep non-taxes, and you're done. You can set corp taxes to zero, and also income taxes for the bottom 60% to zero.
So. If you want to tax just the richest 1%, you can't run the country on that. But you absolutely can run the country just by taxing the rich. If you wanted to.
(Note: this was a thought experiment, not advocacy. I am not a fan of this proposal. I just want to demonstrate that videos like the one I've seen, saying it's impossible to just tax the rich, are using shaky math.)