Progressives who argue that “the rich” should pay their “fair share” of income taxes are inadvertently arguing that they should get a tax cut.

The IRS recently

released new data on tax collection in 2022

. This shows…

once again

– that people with the highest incomes pay a disproportionate share of income taxes. In other words, the income tax is already very progressive.

About 15.4 million tax filers were in the top 10 percent of earners. Their average tax rate was 21.1%. Collectively, they earned about half of the country’s income but paid 72 percent of income taxes.

More than half of this 72% is paid by the richest 1% of employees. This group had 22.4% of the country’s adjusted gross income, but paid 40.4% of all income taxes. Among this group, the average tax bill was more than $560,000. The average tax rate was 26.1%.

In contrast, the bottom half of filers had an average tax bill of $822. Members of this group earned 11.5% of the country’s income but paid only 3% of the country’s income taxes. Their average tax rate was less than 4%.

In practice, it’s less than that.

“Because the Office of Management and Budget classifies the refundable portion of tax credits as expenses, the IRS does not include it in the tax share figures,” Erica York, senior economist at the Tax Foundation,

wrote

. “The result overestimates the tax burden of the bottom half of taxpayers. »

These facts are readily available, but that has not appeased Democratic grandstanding on this issue.

“I’m not mad at anyone for being rich, but they should pay their fair share,” Vice President Kamala Harris said.

said during the campaign

. She continued: “It is not fair that the teachers and firefighters I meet every day across our country pay higher taxes than the wealthiest people in our country. »

Good news. This is not the case, because it applies to employees. Harris and her Democratic allies often resort to these distortions and outright lies because President-elect Donald Trump’s record on this issue is very strong. In 2017, he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. This 2022 data shows that average tax rates for all income categories were lower than in 2017.

One of Trump’s priorities should be

extend tax cuts

which

will expire at the end of 2025 without congressional action

.

As this debate unfolds, expect Democrats to repeat their amorphous “fair share” claims, no matter how absurd they are.

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