That's right. The people who benefit the most from a given social contract, have the most responsibility to ensure that said contract is paid for. Those who are being left behind, have no real responsibility in that sense. That's how social contracts work: every party gets something they want, and gives something in return. The present system only supports the very wealthy - and so nobody else has any moral obligation to pay for it.
Funny. 47 some odd % of "us" pay no taxes.
And that is also fair - the society produced by our social contract does not benefit them enough to justify asking for anything in return. If you want a vital enough middle class that you can expect to tax the income of the lower half of the country, then you need to be supporting a social contract designed to foster a much more robust middle class (and not the social contract you are advocating, which is simply a give-away to the rich designed to reduce society into a master class and a servant class).
But you're incorrect, of course. That statistic only applies to federal income taxes. These same households pay plenty of payroll, sales, property taxes, etc. - and given that those taxes are structured regressively, this represents a very heavy load on the least well-off in our society.
Meanwhile, your average billionaire pays half the federal income tax rate of your average white-collar professional.
Meanwhile, the richest 1% of the country gets 25% of the income - and so should pay 25% of the taxes (at least). The bottom 80% of the country gets less than 40% of the income. The top 10% owns 80% of the assets. The bottom 80% of the population only has only 7% of the financial wealth. You can't tax people that don't have money - so if your favored social contract concentrates all of the money into the hands of the super-wealthy, then that's who will have to pay all of the taxes.
So, yeah, the people getting filthy rich, are the ones who should be paying for the system. They're the ones who benefit, not the mass of people going nowhere. And note that all of these trends have been on a sharp upward slope lately, as the plutocrats have carved out ever more loopholes and give-aways to themselves, and the services and investments needed to support the other 80% of society have been neglected.
So not wanting to float that boat of (predominantly) slackers constitutes not paying our "fair share"?
You'd have to be some sort of disgusting fascist to dismiss 50% of the country - hard-working blue-collar types with families to support and limited access to health care or education or jobs - as "slackers." The fact that your favored policies have so emasculated so much of the country that they don't even earn enough that the federal government can justify taxing their income, is an indictment of your favored policies, and not the middle class.
Maybe some of us rich taxpayers think a person is actually better off (in his own mind and based on his own self evaluation) if he has to get something accomplished for himself and his family.
Again, pretty much a disgusting fantasy to imagine that he does anything else, and that you are proposing anything other than holding back hard-working, vulnerable people. This is not the very small percentage of actual layabouts you're talking about here (many of them are actually wealthy, due to inheritance), but fully
half of the country. Are you really going to insist, with a straight face, that fully half of all households are slackers who don't even try to accomplish anything?
Moreover, you yourself are almost certainly not in the "rich taxpayers" category. That would be billionaires who spend their time comparing luxury yachts and private jets. Your average upper-middle-class professional family, while better off than most, has likewise been dead in the water for the past generation, while the super-rich have seen explosive growth in their wealth and income (and commiserate reduction of their tax burdens). The canard that such people are in the same boat as the rich is maintained exactly to get you to vote against the interests of yourself and ~90% of the country, and for the interests of a super-rich elite. Rule of thumb: if you had to borrow money to buy a house, you aren't rich.
In all likelyhood, you are very much in the same boat as the bottom 80% of the country, and we could pay for a suitable social contract without raising your taxes at all. The top 10-15% of income earners/wealth holders can more than cover it, while still remaining rich and privileged. So, why are you stumping for the emasculation of our society in order to buy the super-rich a few more toys that they don't need? Rule of thumb: if you cannot afford to live in walled compounds patrolled by armed, private security guards and travel everywhere via helicopter, then you have a bigger stake in propping up the welfare state than you do in seeing your taxes cut.
