Rich Americans Pay a Higher Share of Taxes Than the Wealthy in Most Countries
What’s a “fair share” of funding for a government that many Americans distrust?
Like his progressive comrades, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an ambitious big-government agenda he proposes to fund by forcing "rich" people to pay their "fair share." While the word billionaires is often thrown around, smart people understand that wealth will have to be defined generously to pay for everything proposed, and that "fair share" always means more. Even so, lots of Americans are on board with the idea of forcing people they consider rich to pay higher taxes. What they don't understand, and what progressives won't acknowledge, is that the U.S. already puts a heavier burden on high-income people than do most countries.
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'We Can Raise Taxes on the Wealthy'
It's easy to find a politician calling for higher taxes on rich people. In the words of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), "we can afford to ignore the billionaire tears. We can raise taxes on the wealthy, and we can invest that money in lowering costs for everyday families."
Lots of Americans buy what Warren is selling. According to April 2026 polling from Pew Research, "roughly six-in-ten adults now say the feeling that some wealthy people (61%) and corporations (60%) don't pay their fair share bothers them a lot."
What politicians like about terms like fair share and billionaires is that they mean whatever the speaker wants. When Warren proposed a tax targeting wealthier Americans, it started not with billionaires, but with anybody who had assets of at least $50 million. Its provisions included "a 40% 'exit tax' on the net worth above $50 million of any U.S. citizen who renounces their citizenship."
'An Unusually Heavy Share of the Tax Burden on Higher Earners'
But the wealthy already pay a disproportionate share of taxes. "The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 23.1 percent average rate, six times higher than the 3.7 percent average rate paid by the bottom half of taxpayers," the Tax Foundation's Erica York noted in 2024, of 2022 tax data. "The top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97 percent of all federal individual income taxes, while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 3 percent."
The share of taxes paid by wealthy Americans is higher than in most other countries.
"The United States places an unusually heavy share of the tax burden on higher earners," the Cato Institute's Adam N. Michel commented in January. "You wouldn't know this from hearing some politicians claim that the rich escape next to tax-free or deserve to be taxed at higher rates."
Michel drew on a 2025 study by Canada's Fraser Institute, which compared tax progressivity across 33 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. For those with federal systems (except Canada, for which all provinces were examined), the study looked at one high-tax and one low-tax jurisdiction for a full range of progressivity. Tax-hungry California and Texas, which has no state income tax, represented the U.S.
"California (US) (10.00) maintains the most progressive tax system out of the 45 OECD jurisdictions analyzed in this study, followed by Newfoundland & Labrador (Canada) (9.68), Korea (9.43), and Texas (US) (9.03)," observed the authors. "On the bottom end, Hungary (0.00) maintains the least progressive tax system, followed by Estonia (3.25), Slovak Republic (3.36), Latvia (3.59), and Sweden (4.33)."
'The US Stands Out as the Country with the Highest Level of Tax Progressivity'
Canada scored high for progressivity. But "the two American jurisdictions analyzed in this study, California and Texas, ranked first and 4th most progressive, respectively, out of 45 jurisdictions, indicating that the US tax system is even more progressive than Canada."
It's worth emphasizing that California and Texas, which are often talked of as opposing political poles in the U.S., representing progressive blue states on the one hand and conservative red states on the other, were only three positions apart at the top of the tax progressivity scale. The absence of a state income tax in Texas means that the state's progressivity largely represents that of the overall U.S. tax system.
So much for wealthy Americans not paying their "fair share" when Texas and the U.S. overall rank higher for tax progressivity than Sweden, a country many progressives revere.
"This is not a novel result," adds Cato's Adam Michel. "Research by the World Inequality Lab concludes that 'the US stands out as the country with the highest level of tax progressivity.'"
So, progressives and the members of the public following their lead are wrong that the wealthy don't pay their "fair share" in the U.S. Rich Americans pay a higher proportion of taxes than their counterparts in other countries, including many that are considered to embody political values held by left-wing politicians like Zohran Mamdani and Elizabeth Warren.
More Money for a Distrusted Government With 'Too Much Power?'
Much of the belief that the rich don't pay enough money to the government in taxes seems driven more by resentment of success than in a belief that government is underfunded. In fact, most Americans don't trust government and consider it excessively powerful.
A June Fox News/Beacon Research poll found 25 percent of respondents said they "generally trust" the federal government; 74 percent don't. That's the lowest trust in over two decades.
Last October, Gallup reported, "sixty-two percent of Americans say the federal government has too much power." That's the highest share in a quarter century of polling.
Higher taxes paid to the state by anybody would supercharge an institution most of us despise. What's a fair share of that burden?
If there's money for avaricious politicians to mine from the public, it's concentrated among the relatively prosperous, but not rich, urban upper-middle class that increasingly votes Democrat and progressive.
"The upper-middle class is where more of the less-taxed money is located," the Washington Post editorial board noted in April. "Filers with incomes between $100,000 and $500,000 make 49.7 percent of taxable income, yet they pay just 43 percent of all income taxes."
Soaking those taxpayers might raise funds, but it would hurt progressives with their own base. Prosperous urbanites probably don't think of themselves as the "rich" they want taxed. They're also unlikely to place more trust in a government that suddenly turns on them.
If Americans don't like the tax structure, it makes more sense to lower taxes for everybody than to raise taxes that will only make a distrusted government more powerful.
