 Have you ever heard rich people complain that their taxes are too high? Just in case you haven't, I'll play a video clip of a rich person making this complaint so that you can hear it for yourself. This complaint that the rich pay too much taxes sounds laughably absurd to most people. And if you know that their wealth comes from stolen surplus value, it sounds even more absurd. More on that later in the video. So it's no wonder that the conservative YouTube channel PragerU has made videos desperately trying to convince us to take this complaint seriously. Here's a clip from their video to the rich pay their fair share, which in my opinion represents their strongest argument. I mean, that sounds pretty convincing, though they kind of hurt their own credibility later in the video. Weird that PragerU, which by the way is short for Prager University, got the Swedish flag wrong. Hmm, it's almost as if they're not a real university. Oh, that's right. They're not. They're just a conservative YouTube channel that self-identifies as a university. And you know conservatives, they're famous for respecting people's right to self-identify however they choose. But never mind that, let's focus on the tax thing. Do you think the rich pay their fair share in taxes? Fuck not, dude. That was a clip from a video by another conservative YouTube channel called The Daily Wire. The host goes around interviewing people in New York City. Do the rich pay their fair share in taxes? Absolutely not. Absolutely not fair if all things are considered. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. No, no chance. No, absolutely not. The opinion is unanimous, but look how they react after they hear how much federal income tax is paid by the top 1%. Would you be surprised if I told you that the top 1% pay 40% of all taxes? Yeah. Would it surprise you if I said the rich, the 1% pay 40% of all taxes in America? Interesting. What surprised me? Interesting. It's a little more fair than you might have thought. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yes, I would. I didn't know that. Is that surprising? Yes. Does that seem more fair? Well, yeah, it would definitely seem fair. It seems like the bottom should pay a little more. Look how drastically their opinion changes, which is one reason why these videos need to be debunked. Okay, so let's get back to the PragerU video. So, the man in the video is saying that people who make a high income pay a huge portion of taxes, but he's making that portion seem a lot bigger than it really is. Now, I don't want to spend too much time on this point because it keeps the argument about taxes within a liberal framework, and I really want to break out of that into an anti-capitalist perspective on the tax issue. But I do think it's worth spending a couple minutes to show that PragerU is giving a distorted view of the facts. So, first of all, and I swear to you, this is their lesser crime. PragerU just gets the facts straight up wrong. They claim that the top 10%, that's the 10% of the US population who makes more money than the other 90%, they claim that the top 10% makes 43% of all income in the US, when in fact they make 48% of all income. And they say that the top 1% makes 17% of all income, when in fact they make 22% of all income. In other words, they're underselling the size of the economic pie controlled by the rich. The embarrassing thing for PragerU is that I got these numbers using the same source that they did. In the video description for their own video, they have a link to their website, and then their website has links to the sources that they use for that video. Their website gets these statistics right, but their video gets them wrong, so they knew better, but still got it wrong. Very good. Very cool. Sweden. Sweden. Wow, so getting statistics wrong is forgivable. I know. Numbers are hard. But it gets worse. The PragerU video only gives us data for federal income tax, but when we consider all taxes together, the picture looks quite different. This is explained very well in a video by Vox called Who Pays the Lowest Taxes in the US, where they use a cute little graph with cute little characters. So these adorable little guys represent all Americans, and each one represents 10% of the population. The person on the left represents the poorest 10% of Americans, and then the person just to the right of them is representing the next poorest 10%, and up and up the income goes all the way until you get the richest 10%. As you earn more money, you pay a higher portion of your income in taxes. If we just focus on income tax, we see that the tax rate is progressive. Though it stops being progressive when we add in the 400 richest people in the country. But still, the overall general trend is progressive. However, if we consider not just income tax, but all taxes combined, including sales tax, payroll tax, and so on, the picture looks very different. We see that from rich to poor, there is not much difference in the proportion of our income that we pay in taxes. And in fact, the ones who pay the smallest portion of their income are the richest of the rich. So, where does the data for this graph come from? It comes from the IRS, the Internal Revenue Service of the US Federal Government, as reported by the website TaxJusticeNow.org. The information in the Vox video helps us realize that the PragerU video is giving us a very incomplete picture, and it's incomplete in a way that distorts the truth. So yes, if you consider the money that the US Federal Government collects through income tax, then 37% of that money comes from the top 1%. However, if we consider the total amount of money that the government collects from all types of taxes, then the portion paid by the top 1% is approximately 12 or 13%. This is based on data from the US government made available at the website TaxJusticeNow.org, and I've used that data to make this calculation. Feel free to head to the website and check my math. So the top 1% is paying 12 or 13% of the taxes. That's like three times less than what PragerU makes it seem by only focusing on federal income tax. Nice try, PragerU. Better luck fooling people next time. Oh wait, you've already fooled millions of people. Damn it. And you know who else is fooling millions of people? Emily Weyer as can be seen in another clip from their video. What percent of income do you think the top 1% pay? I think they're paying like 2% of that. They're paying 27%. What? 27%. What percent of their income do you think people at the 50% and below pay? Probably higher than 27%. If you get higher, the lower your income comes. What's the weight of the numbers? I think it's probably over 50%. It's 4%. Oh wow. Interesting. That sounds less a little more fair. Yeah, that sounds fair. Man, yeah. I need to study up more on this, man. I'm not paying attention to actual numbers. Would it surprise you if I said that the top 1% pay 27% of their income and taxes? 27%. And the bottom 50% pay 4% of their income and taxes? Really? Yes. Does that seem more fair? Yeah, it would be pretty fair. Tell me that's the reality. 100%. Wow. I'm shocked. I'm shocked. Ugh. It's so upsetting to see that he's just straight up lying to people. And as the graph shows very clearly, he is lying. And remember, this graph is based on federal government data. You can check the numbers for yourself. His numbers are totally wrong. I need to study up more on this, man. I'm not paying attention to actual numbers. Okay, but still. The fact remains that just 1% of the population is paying 12% to 13% of the total tax revenue. How can we justify this? The usual justification that people give is, well, they're rich, so they can afford to pay more. And yeah, of course the rich can afford to pay more. And you could argue that this makes it morally justified. It's an argument that I agree with. But even though this argument might seem progressive, it's still stuck within a distorted perspective. From this perspective, the rich are supporting the rest of us, and we depend on them to finance our schools, our hospitals, our roads, and all our other public spending. From this perspective, we accept the notion that when the rich pay taxes, they give up some of what is theirs. If true, this would make their tax payments like a donation to charity, a donation we think they're morally obligated to give, a donation that they're legally obligated to give, but still, the rich are like philanthropists giving up what's theirs for the greater good of all. Wow. Aren't we just so lucky? The rich spend their lives carrying the rest of us on their backs, and all they ask in return is just a little tax cut so they can afford a second mansion. And by golly, they deserve it. I hope everyone who sees this video goes out and hugs a rich person and says thank you. Thank you for funding all those underfunded and understaffed hospitals and schools. Thank you for funding our crumbling infrastructure and our ever shrinking welfare state. Thank you for giving us so many crumbs from your giant loaf of bread. Just one question. How did you get that bread? Oh, that's right. We baked it for you. Let's talk about that. Imagine you work in a shoe factory. You're paid $10 an hour, and in that hour, you make a pair of shoes that the factory owner sells for $100. Does that mean the owner of the factory makes $90 of profit? They have to pay for the lease on the factory. They have to pay for the machines. They have to pay for all the materials that the shoes are made of. They have to pay a manager to boss you around, and so on. After all these business expenses, let's say in this hypothetical example that the owner is left with $9 of profit per hour, which is less than your $10 per hour wage. Oh, that poor, hard-done-buy capitalist. How very sad for them. Though you might feel a bit less sad for them when you remember that you did all the work, and the owner did nothing. Now, some owners do work as managers, but in this case, no. They hire someone else to manage the factory, and the owner does nothing. And for this nothing, the owner is greatly rewarded because you're not the only one working in the factory. There are 99 others, 99 workers, and the rich ain't one. With you, that's 100 workers in total, each of you producing $9 of profit per hour for the owner, resulting in a total of $900 of profit per hour. So at the end of an 8-hour workday, each worker takes home $80, and the owner takes home $7,200. That $7,200 of profit is the result of your work and the work of all the other shoemakers in the factory. But the profit that you created doesn't go to you or your coworkers. It goes to the owner. Sounds a lot like profit is theft, but it's legal, so I guess it's okay. This is how capitalists make money. Owning and investing in businesses results in profit, and that profit is surplus value created by other people's work. This does not mean that all capitalists are rich, but most rich people are capitalists, and that puts a big plot twist on this whole taxing-the-rich thing, because all that money they pay in taxes, they're just giving back a little bit of what they took from us. And they don't even give it back to us. They give it to the government, which spends some of it on things that benefit us, like schools and health care, but also spends some of it on things like corporate subsidies or wars in the Middle East to defend the freedom of oil companies. In other words, some of the tax money goes straight back into rich people's pockets. That's a good scam, right? But you still have some rich people crying that taxation is theft. What? What? I have to pay a cut. Would I stole fair and square? What is this, Communist Sweden? The type of people who shed tears for the overtaxed rich are the same type of people who love to repeat a paraphrased quote from the former UK Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The trouble with socialism is sooner or later you run out of other people's money. Other people's money? You mean the money you stole from us? And now you have to give some of it back? Oh, boo-hoo. Also, she clearly doesn't understand socialism, but let's not go there. That's like a whole other video. The notion that the rich support the rest of us by paying taxes is false. It's totally backwards. It's the working class who supports the rich who subsidizes their wealth. Now, to be fair, many capitalists don't just sit around doing nothing. Many small business owners do the same type of work as their employees, and even big-time capitalists often work as CEOs and high-level managers. But when capitalists get rich, nearly all their money is not the result of their own work. It comes from profit, the result of work done by others. You just don't get rich through nothing by your own hard work. Maybe you did work hard, but you weren't the only one. How many others worked hard to make you rich? Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, says that he works 90 hours a week. That is a very lot, but that's not why he has $185 billion. There's no way that his own labor could possibly have produced that much wealth. That amount of wealth was produced by the labor of over 1 million Amazon employees. There's this idea that if the rich pay more taxes that this would be tax justice. I have to strongly disagree with that one. The whole concept of tax justice is flawed. There can be no justice in a capitalist system where the wealth of one class is produced by the labor of another. But what about rich people who are not capitalists? They exist, don't they? Like Hollywood actors and professional sports players non-business owning doctors and lawyers. Some of the top 1% are very high paid workers, not capitalists. And when you move below the top 1% to the top 10% as a whole you find even more people who are not capitalists but are highly paid workers. Their income does not come from profit. It comes from their salary, its payment for their own work and a high portion of the total tax revenue comes from them. It's not as much as what PragerU claims since they only look at federal income tax but if you consider all taxes combined, the top 10% of Americans pay about 42% of the tax revenue. So isn't it accurate to say that they contribute more than the rest of us? It's a good question and I will attempt to answer it in the remaining 60 seconds of this video. No, I'm just kidding. It deserves more time and attention than that. So I will address that question in the next video which I will be releasing for all of you in less than a week. So make sure that you're subscribed and make sure you've clicked the bell to turn on all notifications because that's what YouTube makes you do now. The subscribe button is fake, useless and misleading. It's the PragerU of buttons. Anyways, please leave me a comment and if you liked this video please click thumbs up and share the video. Thank you very much. Have yourself a great day and don't forget to go hug the rich. I am contractually obligated to wear my ears at least once in every video so here they are. These are my listening ears. I wear them while I read your comments. They are all the better to hear you as I read. That's how ears work. That's how ears work.