[gknoy]

The GP is talking about the percentage of their income being spent on taxes.

If you make 1 million dollars per year, and I make 100k, and my taxes are 30k per year while yours are 100k/year (numbers made up), you'd be paying more total taxes, and a larger slice of the total tax dollars paid.

However, my taxes are 30% of my income, whereas yours would be only 10% of your income. If we paid at the same "band" of taxes, you would be paying $300k instead of $100k.

Because the tax bands tax you at a lower percent the higher up you go, making more money leads to less proportion of taxes.

Consider also that the people who pay the most tax (in dollars) often have a substantial amount of their wealth in real estate, stocks, or stock options, rather than cash income, and those are all taxed differently than the kind of income that most of us have.

[wooter]

Not to be mean, but this is still all false conjecture and no source. The top 1% earn 19% of income yet pay 35% of all Fed Income Tax. The top 10%, 12% of earned, 12% of paid. The bottom 50% earn 12% but pay 3%.

And thats at the federal level. State income taxes vary from place to place, but nowhere is what you are saying true. And a state would have to apply a substantial effective negative income tax rate for high earners which is laughably unheard of.