It very well could be true, but I'd bet it makes a huge different whether or not your income comes from a paycheck. In Spain, and I believe also in the rest of the European periphery, the tax burden is borne almost exclusively by the middle and upper-middle _salaried_ classes, that put up with confiscatory tax rates at very low brackets (at $60,000, the marginal tax rate is over 50%). By contrast, the truly rich (business owners, rentiers, farmers and what is called 'liberal professionals', i.e., lawyers, private doctors, etc) systematically cheat on their taxes and declare a small fraction of their income, or often no income at all.
In the US, it is my impression that outright tax fraud (as oppposed of taking advantage of loopholes) is relatively rare. Of course, IRS neutering (aka 'reform') will probably change all that.
> Of course, if this is
> so, then nobody should care what happens
> to the top rate.
>
> In the U.S. you can find people who
> ignore or discount the extent to which
> our tax system actually does tax the rich
> for the sake of embellishing their more-
> radical-than-thou alternative.
>
Yep. Many Yank lefties take for granted the fact that rich people in the US, by and large,_do_ pay something like the taxes they are supposed to. It doesn't have to be that way, which is why the left's silence during the incredibly demagogic abnd tendentious roasting of the IRS was so disappointing.
> MBS
-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 758 8962 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique