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President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have spent years advocating tax increases for high-income earners. Yet Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont now argues that the Democratic Party suffered on Election Day because it was insufficiently hostile to the wealthy. So perhaps it’s useful for another review of just how much of the federal tax burden is borne by affluent households, even after President Donald Trump’s landmark 2017 reform. Saddened as Mr. Sanders may be by the results of this year’s elections, perhaps it will warm his socialist heart to know that Washington still discourages people from rising up the income ladder. Erica York writes at the Tax Foundation: New Internal Revenue Service data for tax year 2022 shows the US federal income tax system continues to be progressive as high-income taxpayers pay the highest average income tax rates. Average tax rates for all income groups remained lower in 2022, five years after the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), than they were in 2017 prior to the reform. If the Trump reform of 2017 managed to survive the Biden-Harris era largely intact, perhaps it can even survive the new Trump term and its
weird promises of preferential tax treatment for bartenders. If we dare to hope that Mr. Trump might want to follow his pro-growth triumph of 2017 with an even better reform in 2025, the key is to promote a tax system that is flatter and simpler and broadly increases incentives to work, save and invest. Right now, the federal tax code still unduly punishes success. Ms. York notes: The average income tax rate in 2022 was 14.5 percent. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 23.1 percent average rate, six times higher than the 3.7 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers. She adds that in 2022 the top 1% earned about 22% of the income and paid
about 40% of the taxes on income. Ms. York also notes:
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