If you have paid attention to politics in America for more than five minutes, then you have likely read an article or opinion column or seen a news report or analysis on the income disparity between the “1 percent” and the rest of the nation. It does not take long at all to see a debate on this issue played out.
From the left, you will hear the statistic that the top 1 percent owns 35.4 percent of the nation’s wealth. They will use this number to call for more progressive tax structures. As President Obama puts it, we should “ask some of the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share.”
The Occupy movement was born out of the belief that the “99 percent” were being treated unfairly when compared to the 1 percent. Last week, Politico ran a story about the 1 percent gearing up to “strike back” against economic policies that might hurt them. These are talking points that crop up over and over, with seemingly little change from one year to the next. Why is it that so much rhetoric is thrown about regarding the unfairness of the 1 percent, yet little ever really changes?
A report by the University of California at Santa Cruz, the same report from which the 35.4 percent number comes, found that the greedy 1 percent paid 35 percent of all taxes, compared to only 31.74 percent from the bottom 90 percent. The numbers for the 1 percent are equal: 35 percent of wealth and 35 percent of taxes. Yet the left continues to claim that they do not pay their fair share.
When the numbers are broken down to the top 20 percent, rather than the 1 percent, the numbers actually do become unequal. The top 20 percent owns 59.1 percent of the nation’s wealth, yet it pays 64.3 percent of the taxes.
Interestingly, Obama does not mention the fact that the bottom 20 percent owns 3.5 percent of the nation’s wealth while only contributing 1.9 percent of all taxes. What do these numbers mean? For starters, it means that Obama does not understand what fair share means, though I have already addressed that issue before in this spot.
These numbers also tell us that the current tax structure is fairly set up for the top earners, but gets progressively less fair as it goes down, though not in the direction the left will have you believe.
Instead of focusing on rhetoric and party mantra while masking the reality of the situation, perhaps we should focus on policies that will bring the bottom up, rather than pulling the top down.
Trenton Winford is a senior public policy leadership major from Madison.
