Your argument (in the good sense of the word) that the top 1% of earners pay 40% of taxes kept echoing in my mind. I will respectfully attempt to refute that this suggests that this 1% should not pay more in taxes. I will provide as background an article I found on the subject from that noted left wing propaganda organ, the Wall Street Journal.
Read this before proceeding; http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/09/26/why-the-rich-pay-40-of-taxes/
I will attempt to keep my feelings about this to a brief discussion. By some accounts, and I haven't really seen these kinds of figures debated, the top 1% owns 42% of the wealth of the country. Some numbers may vary but I haven't seen anyone even debating the general lopsidedness of the wealth disparity that is growing every year.
Now say that this process continued so that ten people owned 42% of the wealth. Say the country was in an even more terrible recession, arguably initiated or at least accentuated by the manipulation of that wealth by those ten people. This could be done by, say, holding on to the money without reinvesting in anything or moving the money overseas. To make things worse a few trillion dollars were waged on unnecessary wars with no provision for funding. Say the unemployment rate was 18% and foreclosures were happening at two times our rate. The economic scenario is not unimaginable.
Now would ten people need to keep 42% of the country's wealth under these circumstances? What could they possibly do with it that would be worth the economic destruction of the nation. If the political process didn't send them notice the rabble would. And we don't want that.
I have no problem with people making and keeping very large sums of money. But how many hundreds of millions does any citizen need. How many different estates, fancy cars, horses, and boats can a body use before they should start thinking about giving back to the society that made it possible for them to become rich in the first place? We are not talking about stripping them of their wealth, we are talking about asking them to do throw in some more to help avert a real catastrophe.
If you find any credence in this argument then the question becomes one of “where do you draw the line?” Should this be asked if the 42% of wealth was held by 100 people, a thousand? .1% etc.
It is not a question of punishing the rich. It is a question of everybody throwing in to avert further degeneration and possible catastrophe. Perhaps they could go back to paying the rates during the Reagan and Clinton decades, during the “good times”.