A report has been making the rounds this week by UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman whose deep dive found that the richest 400 families in the country in 2018 were taxed 23% on average. That’s less than the bottom half of American households, who paid 24.2% when factoring in the totality of taxes Americans pay.
The idea of “progressive” taxes is that people making more money should have to pay more when they make over a certain thresholds or “tax brackets”. While Saez and Zucman dig into various tax exemptions rather than the explicitly stated and public tax brackets, the stated taxes have been regularly becoming less progressive not only in the US, but also in Canada.
I made the following graph shows to how tax brackets have changed since 1949.
Combined Federal and Provincial Marginal Income Tax Rates for Selected Years and Selected Nominal Income Levels, 1949 to 1994
Source: The National Finances, 1985-86 (Toronto: Canadian Tax Foundation, 1986), 101, and The National Finances, 1994 (Toronto: Canadian Tax Foundation, 1994), 7:7. a The provincial rates are assumed to be 30.5 of the basic federal tax in 1972, 47 percent in 1986 and 1987, and 52 percent in 1994. Note: Owing to the refundable goods and service tax credits and child tax benefits, the 1994 rates for the lower income levels are not comparable to those of earlier years.
(More info: https://www.fcf-ctf.ca/ctfweb/Documents/PDF/1995ctj/1995CTJ5_02_Smith.pdf)