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I could find one good reason for the top 1% making 18% of money to pay 27% of taxes - military and government contracts.

Many of the top earning CEOs and top companies will get a lot of their money from contracts paid via taxes (selling articles to the army, military training, other government projects with debatable gain for the community). Those taxes are paid by everyone. If the top companies' owners get money for those services, they basically get paid using the tax from all other groups. Since more money from taxes == more contracts possible, we might want them to get taxed more - otherwise it's like they're getting a natural tax return via a closed loop in money flow.



That's not a good reason for taxing the top 1% more, that's a good reason for taxing those benefiting from military and government contracts more. The two groups don't perfectly overlap.


However, unless you get the tax rate(s) correct so that the return is negative, the more they get in this loop the more they retain.

The traditional response to this problem is to limit the scope of government. The fewer government contracts, the less this is a problem.

A lot of people noted the incongruity of Ross Perot's populism, given that so much of his income was from IT contracts with various governments.




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