The source I got it from was Chad Hermann's the Radical Middle blog, which itself was quoting other sources and had the mixed use of "wealth" and "income" terms.

I've seen similar numbers earlier, such as the NY Times (top 1 percent had 21.8 percent of income in 2005) and NY Times Economics Blog (top 1 percent had slightly over 20% of income and paid 40% of income taxes in 2007). The latter source links to the IRS data and also has some good charts.

Outright fraudlent spending is pretty small. But what's harder to quantify is how much we're spending because the government "business practices" are still archaic. Normal businesses expect that each year, they need to find ways to trim their expenses to do the same work. Government bureaucracies expect to get a percentage increase each year to do the same work.

I've spent time working for a federal contractor. Initially I was naive enough to think that providing government a service for less money would be rewarded. It turns out that spending less money than your customer planned to spend is frowned upon by the government. Why? Because if the agency doesn't spend every penny, next year their budget will be cut - the powers that be reason that if you didn't spend it, you don't need it. What bureaucrat wants his budget cut? He may need the funds next year, so he's not going to risk losing every future year's funding by spending less this year.

It's logical at a local level, but crazy at the macro level.

I would say it's waste if government is providing something that, however desirable to me, is either:

A) not absolutely essential for people to have, or
B) more effectively provided by organizations other than government.

Stuff that broad majorities would agree we absolutely cannot do without as a society - some degree of national defense, police protection, and basic social insurance. There will be debates over how much of these things we need, but large majorities agree that some level of these things are vital and cannot be effectively provided other than through government.

Things that we don't need the government to produce or subsidize: our entertainment (the arts). I love going to concerts, for example. But if folks like the entertainment, they'll gladly pay admission. We don't need to use taxes to force everyone to subsidize the entertainment of a few.

Examples of government doing things that would be better managed elsewhere: Central Park in New York. It used to be government-run, and was poorly maintained and crime-ridden. The city handed management over to a private company, which has to do well or lose the business, and now the park is beautifully maintained and safe.

In some countries that may be true.

But in the US, the "rich" - to be specific, let's say the top 1% - earned 25% of the wealth and paid 38% of the income taxes. That doesn't sound like "virtually nothing".

Probably a lot. The problem is that government bureaucracies have no competition. No accountability for poor performance means most governments (like other monopolies) perform poorly.

You could, and there is truth to the argument in that direction too. But if you look at the history of government in the US, it has been pretty uniformly in the direction of bigger and more expensive, so I doubt you have to worry that we'll be getting rid of popular entitlement programs like Social Security, incrementally or otherwise.

But when an "incremental" change involves the granting of new authority to a regulator, we do need to be careful. Especially when that regulator is the FCC, which has a long history of standing in the way of competition and new technology (ie the public interest), to appease politically connected incumbents. It's a stretch to think that the FCC leopard is suddenly going to change its spots and become some sort of protector of the consumer.

I need to proofread better. I meant to say the *former* (food/lifestyle judgmentalism) is more recent.

by "socially liberal" they really mean live-and-let-live, i.e. stop trying to use the government to coerce people into following your own cultural/religious/social views.

It's not really accurate to label this "socially liberal", as many liberals in the US are as fond of using government force as social conservatives. The liberal nanny-state folks in the US tend to focus more on food and lifestyle, whereas conservative nanny-staters focus on sex and religion. But the latter seems to be a more recent phenomenon, so folks seeking the opposite of socially conservative nanny statism tend to say they're socially liberal.

"Libertarian" is probably more accurate, but the term is not so widely known.

The thing is... the rich can buy a lot of security people with guns. The rich can in fact pay their security guys quite well to ensure their loyalty. You see this pattern quite a lot in less civilized, undemocratic societies. The wealthy will be OK either way.

It's your average guy that needs the protection of the state the most, lest he be abused by everyone from those wealthy strongmen to the local bully.

Maybe it's because they don't vote out of self-interest as much as they vote their conscience.

Maybe their conscience tells them that millionaires should pay a reasonable share of the taxes, but should not be our perpetual piggy bank whenever we want to spend on [insert new shiny government project here]. Because they feel that money should go to those who have earned it, rather than those who merely want to coerce it from their more successful neighbors at the point of the government's gun.

Everyone benefits from a stable society, rule of law, public infastructure, etc. Not just billionaires but everyone.

Nobody's saying that the well-off shouldn't pay a fair share towards society's upkeep. The argument is over how much is fair.

Re: taxes as theft: it's possible to simultaneously recognize two truths:

1. The moral hazard of taxes. Your earnings are being confiscated by threat of force - something that's criminal in all situations but one - when it's being done by the government. Income taxes mean you essentially are a slave to the government for a fraction of the year.
2. The practical necessity of taxes. Some government is necessary and funding it voluntarily will likely not be effective.

This is the classic case of a "necessary evil". You can recognize its necessity without having to ignore its moral ramifications. Sometimes there's just no perfect answer.

Let's not mistakenly assume that the successful were thus because the "playing field" was slanted in their favor.

The field has all sorts of defects, but some folks do play the game harder or smarter than the rest.

3 percent less pay in exchange for all that job security is hardly a bad deal for most employees.

Trickle-up or trickle-down both miss the point. The economy is an ecosystem - everything is interdependent. Changes to one part of the system affect another. There's no free lunch - any money trickling out of the government. whether to the "bottom" or the "top", had to trickle into the government (via taxes or debt) from somewhere else first.

To illustrate the interconnectedness problem, take your CEO example. Which number do you think the CEO cares about - their pre-tax income, or their after-tax income? Clearly it's the after-tax number - that's what determines his actual spending power. So if a new government tax reduces his after-tax income by raising tax rates, there are a few possible scenarios:

1. The CEO asks his board to give him a raise to make up the difference. The board reasons that they like their CEO and don't want risk losing him to another business, so they agree. Since the money has to come from somewhere, the business:
A. Hires fewer workers
B. Invests less in future product development
C. Raises prices (may happen even in a competitive market if all competitors face the same tax law change)

None of those options are a good outcome - you've reduced current jobs, future growth, or current standards of living, respectively.

2. The CEO asks for, but does not get any additonal funds to cover the tax. His lower level of disposable income now means he:
A. Cuts his family's consumption
B. Has less savings to invest in his portfolio

On aggregate, A means other businesses sell less product, and thus may need to lay off workers. B means other businesses don't get as much of the capital they need to start up or expand, thus inhibiting hiring.

Any way you dice it, there are economic downsides to any tax. No free lunch.

Of course there is a notable upside to taxes too - namely that the government raises the funds to pay for its activities. Some services are essential government functions, and the money has to come from somewhere. It's just that "somewhere" is rarely only the entity directly paying the tax bill - the ripple effects impact everyone those entities buy from or sell to.

It just comes down to a tradeoff. What do we lose versus what do we gain by a given governmental policy. Folks will disagree on those decisions, because there isn't always an objectively "right" or "wrong" answer. It's a question of personal values and preferences.

Lots of people and businesses do move when states increase their tax burdens.

What often happens is that businesses are the first to start leaving, because being in a lower-tax state gives them competitive advantages. If you move your business to a state with a lower personal tax burden, you can effectively spend the same amount of money to give your employees higher after-tax earnings. As a business owner you keep more of your profits, so can more easily reinvest in the business.

And once the businesses start moving, populations follow as they find more job opportunities out-of-state than in. That's what happened to the area where I grew up. I would've liked to stay near my family and high school relatives, but the job opportunities were bad there. I believe this to be largely because of decades of poor governance - heavy corruption coupled with high taxes and regulations. I found far better jobs, and lower taxes, in another state and moved there.

This sort of pattern is why you see things like this: State Migration Trends. The link uses IRS data to track changes in the number of tax returns (i.e. taxpayers) in each state, as well as the income earned by those individuals. It shows a trend over the last 15 years of people moving out of high-tax states (generally Northeastern states and California) to lower-tax states (generally in the South, and Washington State).

The easier alternative is that when it's government research, the government should take the utmost care in presenting its results to the media, so as to minimize the chance that the media misunderstands it.

Most of the media is not intentionally trying to distort the science, but they are human with all sorts of biases and limited knowledge of science. A careful communication to the media of what the study showed and did not show is all they need to do. They don't need to regulate the media's reporting, just make sure they're giving the media hard-to-misunderstand summaries of the research.

They're probably trying to avoid the problems that result when some random government employee espouses their personal opinions yet get referred to as "a government scientist" by the media, thus implying that the personal opinion is somehow government sanctioned or verified.

I work at an engineering firm. We have lots of smart people and lots of opinions. But we are not supposed to go talking to the media, because we are neither trained nor skilled in conveying information to journalists. This isn't anything nefarious - it's a recognition of the fact that you can be both a brilliant technical person and utterly incompetent when it comes to communicating with the media or other non-technical audiences. You don't want the media reporting things incorrectly just because the individual interviewed doesn't communicate well.

And that doesn't even factor in how bad some of the science reporting out there is. Sometimes it's so wrong it doesn't make any sense until you read the actual journal paper. Even when it's right, often you see unproven speculation mixed in with what the reported-upon study actually showed. Especially if it fits some cultural stereotype or media narrative. There's so much pseudo-information in the major media's reporting of science, that there is good reason to have an accuracy filter in place when communicating government research results to the public.

That said, such review could also be abused for political ends. But in this case they're not limiting publication to the scientific journals, so it's not like they're keeping their research secret. It's really just being careful not to put unprepared or incompetent communicators in front of the press.