If you want to meet a group of people who are paying their “fair share,” look no further than New York’s 1 percent.
The New York Post reports on a review of city tax returns from 2009 (the latest year available) by New York’s Independent Budget Office:
[A] new analysis released yesterday shows that the top 1 percent of New York City’s moneymakers paid 43.2 percent of the city’s income tax — even though they accounted for just 33.8 percent of total income here. …
Then there were those in the top 10 percent who had incomes of at least $105,400 and chipped in 71.2 percent of income-tax collections, while pulling in just 58.2 percent of income generated here.
The review of tax returns was conducted at the request of City Councilman James Oddo, who said that many of his middle-class constituents are in the top 10 percent category and he felt they were being demonized in the class war inspired by Occupy Wall Street (which today is attempting to shut down commerce in ports on the West Coast).
Speaking of class warfare, Steve Conover, recently retired from a career in corporate America, had a fascinating piece on The American calling for “the class warfare we need,” which is quite different from the version put forward by Occupy Wall Street. Conover writes:
As it stands today, the class war has misidentified the enemy. Not all of the rich are the “bad guys” who deserve targets on their backs.
By the same token, not all of the remainder are the “good guys” who deserve to be defended—and that includes the middle class, the poor, small businesses, and any other group we don’t usually think of as rich.
It’s just not as simple as “the rich versus the rest.”…
A virtuous war would be one that rewards society’s honest earners and productive contributors, while punishing society’s predators, pirates, and parasites—all without regard to anyone’s income level. It is a target-rich environment that includes anyone (of any income level) who is cheating to win, any business or union (of any size) with its snout in the public trough, any politician filling that trough and feeding those snouts for reciprocal gain, and any group using the political system (at any level) to maintain its monopoly, or its winning “edge” against less-well-connected competitors.
Conover argues that most of the rich are rich because they earned their money. They do not need to be denigrated for this. Conover is not so sanguine about financiers who got rich by gaming the system, tech savvy people and small businesses which prey on the elderly.
He also cites businesses large and small which are “sufficiently well-connected politically to maintain their comfort and longevity by extracting government subsidies for their special interest, or by getting their political friends to pass favorable legislation against competitive threats.”
Conover’s list of villains may occasionally have some overlap with Occupy (i.e., the tricky financiers) but it recognizes that producers and earners, even very rich ones, keep society going and do not deserve the condemnation of class warriors.