The deeper problem with the millionaire's taxes discussion is in the comments on Drum's post (there were 209 as I write this).
The word "greedy" was introduced by the first commentor, and it's an unfortunate word that colored the whole subsequent discussion.
It's not greedy to want to pay less in taxes. It might be stingy, mean, or cheap, but it's not greedy.
Greed is trying to get more than a fair share of some shared resource. You're greedy if you have a second helping of cake before some people have had their first. But this assumes a social context where all participants are equally entitled to a piece of cake: the cake is a shared resource.
As it happens, there is a political philosophy that advocates treating personal income or wealth as a shared resource, subject to state division. So don't call low-tax-proponents greedy, guys -- it shows your true colors!
CalPundit (Kevin Drum) wrote, on the subject of rich folks opposition to social programs, that a millionaire would only pay 30% of his income to the federal government, and a total of only 9% of their income would be used to pay for social programs. This 9% figure comes from adding the Social Security and Medicare taxes withheld to "$70,000 toward the social welfare programs that make up approximately a quarter of the rest of the federal budget."
John Cole is all over this, and Free Speech has another good point. But I have a different problem with this post.
I don't see where Drum is getting these numbers. I did a little work on this and for a single person with $1,000,000 in gross salary income I get $380,648.30 total federal tax of which $20,263.80 is Social Security and Medicare taxes. That yields more than $110,000 spent on social programs, or 11%.
What's more, we've left out state taxes. Our millionaire friend will pay $94,823.45 in state taxes if he lives in California (as I did and I assume Mr. Drum does). Of that, $416.14 is for state disability insurance and the rest is income tax.
Let's assume the same 25% of the state budget is spent on social programs. It's probably more, since the state doesn't spend anything on defense. Ah hell, I'll look it up. Here's the Governor's budget document. It's about 4 MB. The state of California spends 24.1% of its General Fund on Health and Human Services so 25% is about right. More fun facts: California spends 57.2% of its general fund on education (43.6% K-12 and 13.6% higher) and receives 5/6 of its general fund revenue from individuals via personal income tax (48%) and sales tax (33%).
Okay, so we wind up with a total tax of $475,471.75 on $1,000,000 of earned income. Continuing to use the 25% number for the fraction of income tax spent on social programs, we wind up with a total of $134,378.50 spent on social programs: $113,697.75 via income tax and $20,680.74 via payroll taxes. That's a total of 13.4% of the millionaire's gross pay.
Nearly 1.5 times Mr. Drum's number.
Of course, this does not address the other point (how can these rich guys be complaining about this?!), which I hope to get to later.