Via the Washington Examiner:
Mulvaney declared, “The top 20 percent of folks who file a tax return, the top 20 percent, pay 95 percent of the taxes.”
OMB later cited internal data to the Washington Examiner that said the top 20 percent of people to pay income taxes account for 94.8 percent of those taxes in 2016.
That appears to be a jump from just a few years ago. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal reported that the top 20 percent of income earners paid 84 percentof income taxes.
Mulvaney explained:
If you break the income tax universe into what we call quintiles, so equal sized 20 percent columns, the first two columns, the first quintile and the lower quintile, don’t pay any taxes at all. In fact they net positive. We pay them when they file a tax return.
That middle quintile, which you might describe, some people do, as middle class, pays an effective rate in the low single digits. And all of the taxes are paid by folks in the top two quintiles, and that last quintile pays almost fully, 95 percent I think, of the taxes.
People always ask all the time, ‘Why do you want to give a tax cut to the rich?’ Here’s the math. We have a progressive tax system, which means that if you make $1 million and I make $50,000, we both pay the exact same rate on the first, let’s say, $20,000. And then, from the next $20,000 up to my $50,000, and her next $20,000 to her next $50,000, we pay the same, I think it’s 12 percent of 15 percent, I can’t remember where the brackets are right now. And then she goes on to pay her higher rate on the stuff that she makes and I stop.
Well, if you want to give me, the middle class, a cut, take my 15 percent rate down to say 10 percent, and that gives the middle class a cut. Guess who else benefits from that, she does. She pays that same rate on the way up the brackets.
His conclusion, “You could sit there and do nothing but lower the rates on the middle class, and all other things being equal, you’re giving the rich a tax cut.