Alternate explanation that can co-exist with or replace the above:

American parties always seem to maintain party discipline over their members, forcing those with other views to either remain silent, or leave.

Your comment reminded me of James Traficant, the former congressman of Ohio. He went to jail for bribery, and then came out of jail suddenly caring about prison inmates. I've seen this in a few other, former elected officials, who have gone to jail.

Maybe “always” should be “only”

@iamnowhere this is music to my ears. Under the slap stick stupidity of Congress (albeit with real consequences unfortunately) lay bigger problems.

I'll redo the argument slightly differently. The core management problem is demands on resources always exceed resources. So perhaps the single salient aspect of management is the strategy and parameters which yields a procedure on what demand to reject leaving YES to remaining demands.

One weakness of the current strategy is it's too greedy and short termed. Now perhaps the Chinese take it too far the other way (not consequence free btw) but we USA are too anemic short term.

Perhaps one change post 1980 is prices may have to go up to trade for longer term stability and jobs in the US. Second, although I think corps and top 5% are under taxed (after writeoffs are incl) Washington's congress doesnt have the institutional credibility to tax it because perpetual debt spending is normal ... which is variation on all that matters is the next election ie short term thinking.

Congress is really competent about getting voters stuff now --- they have no self sourced and self disiplined way to manage demands --- and paying for it after the next election by more debt. Nowadays they even stopped faking concern about debt.

> Neither of these models is probably appropriate for the present day US, but there must be something out there besides neoliberalism and full privatization. (Futarchy? Some new branch of government to direct state investment? Allow states to own and operate businesses? Creativity is necessary.)

The French already pioneered this[0]. Their GDP per capita has flatlined for over 15 years, though in real terms (PPP) it's fairing better. Notably, they remain a modern Western nation that still has significant capability for building new things.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme

> This is because individual investments (retirement plans and pensions, the largest holders of equities) demand that growth.

I don't disagree with you but it's much worse in the EU, where mandatory contribution to the state for pension funds are gigantic ponzi schemes: the money wasn't invested in equities but directly spent. Now most EU countries are heavily indebted and simply shall soon have no way to honor the pension they promised their citizens. Greece already (partially) defaulted on its public debt a few years ago. More countries shall follow. France is in a particularly bad position at the moment, for example.

Now there are private, optional, pension funds in the EU and citizens have to opt-in to these and these do put their funds in equities etc. Still beats a full-on ponzi, if you ask me.

To be fair, he really played down/ backpedaled and shifted right from a lot of positions he took as Massachusetts governor when running for federal office.

I thought he did very decent job here in Massachusetts, but was really hard to see him run away from that experience in his presidential campaign. His “binders full of women” gaffe seems quaint now days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binders_full_of_women

Decent enough person/politician despite coming from management consulting. He didn’t loose his spine in Washington.

2012? Against the wildly popular incumbent? Blaming it all on smears seems like a rationalization. So the real question is what would have happened if Romney had run in 2016. But we basically know what would have happened, because there were other moderate/conservative candidates who did run in 2016. And the answer to that is the Republican party would have still fallen for the temptation of the New York democrat con artist who paid lip service to their longstanding frustrations but didn't have any actual policy beyond "burn it all down".

> Considering that the top 1% of taxpayers pay more in income taxes than the bottom 90% combined I would say the rich are already taxed.

There are multiple errors of omission in the above statement, I won't address all of them, but the easiest to understand (but unfortunately the least informative) is this:

Individual income taxes provide only 49% of all tax revenue, so you are arguing only about a minority portion of all federal tax revenue. Another 3% come from corporate income taxes. Yeap, that's right, only 3%!

The rest come almost exclusively from Social Security and Medicare taxes and there, the top 1% provide about 1% because their contributions are capped at a very low level.

That omission alone makes your statement look like an attempt to deceive by hiding half of the real numbers.

They need to pay more if the US wants to avoid becoming an aristocracy. The top 1%’s share of income is growing rapidly, while the bottom 90%’s share is shrinking.

https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-for-the-top-1-skyrocketed-160...

Lets conceed that what you're saying is true (I didn't check but don't find it unebelievable).

"Percentage of taxes are paid by the top %1" is just one metric, but there's no reason why we should consider it the only criterion.

I would argue that in our world what you said might be true, and at the same time the bottom 90% lives their day to day with the threat that if they disobey their employer, their lives might quickly fall apart, and I would further argue that the latter is more telling about fairness in our society, than "top 1% pays more than bottom 90%"

Alternative framing: If you have to earn money and pay income tax, you are not really rich.

They are taxes, but they’re paying pennies on the dollar. While the rest of us are paying quarters for every dollar earned.

By golly, I do wonder why the labor class are the ones paying the taxes on their labor compared to the capital owner class! Riveting stuff.

Isn't that only because the wages of the bottom 90% have stagnated so long?

“Tax The Rich At The Same Rate Or Greater Than The Average Rate The Middle Class Are Taxed With” makes for a bad headline, no matter how much clarity it brings to the issue. It’s expected that the top 1% pay the top 99% of taxes in total dollars; that’s how a tax is supposed to work! All that’s needed is to address the unfairness in tax rate; 50% is the tax rate for $250k/year salary, so surely it’s fine to charge a billionaire the same 50% rate on their full earnings (without the ‘unsold gains’ loopholes, offshore holdings, and self-serving trusts exemptions).

I’d rather Romney hadn’t been driven by spite to chime correctly at 12 straight up on the stopped clock, but +1 advocate is still better than +0.

Now do the payroll tax.

aka 'People pay taxes in proportion to the money they have, not in proportion to the amount of population they make up'

Do do 'percentage of total wealth paid in taxes annually' for the bottom and the top groups.

Do you have a source for that wild assertion?

Taking that as true, that doesn't address the actual problem. The US tax code has so many loopholes and specific rules that only ever apply to a handful of people that we might as well be talking about two different sets of laws.

Even calling them "the 1%" is not particularly helpful, because 1% of America is still, like, three and a half million people. These are small business owners and the like; the kinds of people who are well off but still actually doing real productive work. Like, of course they pay the most taxes.

Once you start getting into the 1% of the 1% - "the 0.01%" - then you can afford to hire an accountant who can engineer you a favorable tax situation. And so your tax share starts falling.

But at the level of the 1% of the 0.01% - "the 0.0001%" - you can get custom-designed tax loopholes to favor you and you alone. Because at this level, you're talking about around 348 Americans, all with astronomically high wealth, paying almost no taxes. At this level, the amount of material wealth doesn't even matter; it's all bound up in hypotheticals and illiquid assets. Some of them might be CEOs, or interlocking directors, or politicians. But their real value is all in social capital - their connectedness to other 0.0001%ers who collectively own the economy and can move mountains in their favor.

this is wrong logic. what if 90-99 % are paying 95% of actual taxes?

Nonsense. The amount of wealth hoarded by the top 0.1%, 1%, and 10% has vastly expanded in the past decades, while the percent of all income and wealth held by workers has been gutted.

That alone shows the top earners are not being taxed enough.

If they were losing wealth and portion of income, you might have an argument. But they are not and you do not.

The top 1% earn 22.4% of ALL income (AGI). [0]

The top 1% held 30.8% of all US wealth in 2024. That amount has grown from 22.8% in 1989.[1]

>> the top 0.1% of households in terms of wealth held 8.5% of the nation's wealth in Q3 1989. By Q2 2025, that had risen to 13.9% For the rest of the top 1%, the percentages rose from 14.3% to 17.1% over the same period. So the wealthiest top 1% now holds more than 30% of all wealth. Those gains came at the expense of the less-wealthy household categories, all of which lost ground on a percentage basis. The bottom 50%, for example, saw their share fall from an already low 3.5% down to 2.5%. [0]

NONE of this is because workers have somehow become worse

ALL of it is because those at the top have become more greedy, and have been enabled by craven politicians of a particular party who support that.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-in...

[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-the-1s-share-of-...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/30/income-to-be-in-top-1-percen...