From The Daily Mail:
• Highest paid to contribute almost 30% of all income tax in 2013-14
• Up from just 20% a decade ago as richest shoulder more of the burden
• £1million earners pay 12% of tax, up from 6.4% at the last election
So what? The top one per cent collect (at least) 15% of all taxable income and pay income tax at double the rate of basic rate taxpayers, that's your 30% right there.
Income tax is progressive and other taxes are regressive*. You can pick and choose to illustrate your point:
We could also point out that the top one per cent of earners only pay about one-and-a-half per cent of Employee's National Insurance, or one per cent of all Council Tax or TV license payments. Or that income tax is only about a quarter of all tax revenues - it doesn't sound nearly as dramatic if you say that the income tax paid by the top one per cent of earners (who get 15% or 20% of all taxable income) is only seven or eight per cent of all tax revenues.
And why would it be so terrible if the top one per cent of UK landowners were expected to pay thirty per cent of all Land Value Tax? Why would that suddenly be so destabilising? Nobody's forcing them to own it and by simply owning land they contribute nothing of value to society as a whole.
* As it happens, the two most damaging taxes - VAT and Employer's NIC are fairly flat if expressed as a percentage of incomes; the people who lose out most from those two are the people who don't pay any at all, in other words, the businesses which go out of business and the people who end up unemployed.
