Alternate explanation that can co-exist with or replace the above:

American parties always seem to maintain party discipline over their members, forcing those with other views to either remain silent, or leave.

Your comment reminded me of James Traficant, the former congressman of Ohio. He went to jail for bribery, and then came out of jail suddenly caring about prison inmates. I've seen this in a few other, former elected officials, who have gone to jail.

Maybe “always” should be “only”

Do you have a source for that wild assertion?

Isn't that only because the wages of the bottom 90% have stagnated so long?

this is wrong logic. what if 90-99 % are paying 95% of actual taxes?

Now do the payroll tax.

Taking that as true, that doesn't address the actual problem. The US tax code has so many loopholes and specific rules that only ever apply to a handful of people that we might as well be talking about two different sets of laws.

Even calling them "the 1%" is not particularly helpful, because 1% of America is still, like, three and a half million people. These are small business owners and the like; the kinds of people who are well off but still actually doing real productive work. Like, of course they pay the most taxes.

Once you start getting into the 1% of the 1% - "the 0.01%" - then you can afford to hire an accountant who can engineer you a favorable tax situation. And so your tax share starts falling.

But at the level of the 1% of the 0.01% - "the 0.0001%" - you can get custom-designed tax loopholes to favor you and you alone. Because at this level, you're talking about around 348 Americans, all with astronomically high wealth, paying almost no taxes. At this level, the amount of material wealth doesn't even matter; it's all bound up in hypotheticals and illiquid assets. Some of them might be CEOs, or interlocking directors, or politicians. But their real value is all in social capital - their connectedness to other 0.0001%ers who collectively own the economy and can move mountains in their favor.

Lets conceed that what you're saying is true (I didn't check but don't find it unebelievable).

"Percentage of taxes are paid by the top %1" is just one metric, but there's no reason why we should consider it the only criterion.

I would argue that in our world what you said might be true, and at the same time the bottom 90% lives their day to day with the threat that if they disobey their employer, their lives might quickly fall apart, and I would further argue that the latter is more telling about fairness in our society, than "top 1% pays more than bottom 90%"

“Tax The Rich At The Same Rate Or Greater Than The Average Rate The Middle Class Are Taxed With” makes for a bad headline, no matter how much clarity it brings to the issue. It’s expected that the top 1% pay the top 99% of taxes in total dollars; that’s how a tax is supposed to work! All that’s needed is to address the unfairness in tax rate; 50% is the tax rate for $250k/year salary, so surely it’s fine to charge a billionaire the same 50% rate on their full earnings (without the ‘unsold gains’ loopholes, offshore holdings, and self-serving trusts exemptions).

I’d rather Romney hadn’t been driven by spite to chime correctly at 12 straight up on the stopped clock, but +1 advocate is still better than +0.

Alternative framing: If you have to earn money and pay income tax, you are not really rich.

They need to pay more if the US wants to avoid becoming an aristocracy. The top 1%’s share of income is growing rapidly, while the bottom 90%’s share is shrinking.

https://www.epi.org/blog/wages-for-the-top-1-skyrocketed-160...

aka 'People pay taxes in proportion to the money they have, not in proportion to the amount of population they make up'

Do do 'percentage of total wealth paid in taxes annually' for the bottom and the top groups.