A recent Press Herald editorial (Our View, June 14) favorably reviews a provocative ProPublica report that a few very wealthy individuals paid little or no federal income tax in recent years. We can have a debate about the desirability of a number of tax deductions and exemptions that are of particular value to those with large incomes, but the debate isn’t helped by accusations that the tax system is “rigged” or by misleading calculations of tax rates that are artificially low and meaningless because they are based on increases in asset values rather than income.

The reality of who pays the income tax is a very different picture. Using Internal Revenue Service data from 2018, the Tax Foundation finds that the top 1 percent of earners paid 40 percent of all federal income tax that year, and that the top 10 percent paid 70 percent. The bottom 50 percent paid only 2.9 percent.

Social activists constantly complain that the wealthy don’t pay their fair share of taxes. But if the 40 percent share of income taxes paid by the top 1 percent of earners isn’t fair, what would be?

By the way, raising the top tax rate by a couple of percent wouldn’t come close to paying for Joe Biden’s spending blowout. It is always tempting to have someone else pay for government largesse, but as Europe discovered years ago, financing a progressive welfare state requires that the bottom 50 percent of earners pay a lot more than 3 percent of the income tax burden.

Martin Jones
Freeport