Tax Day Hits American Workers Harder than the Richest of the Rich

April 20, 2026

Tax Day just passed and most workers are probably pretty angry after seeing how much of their income went to taxes. And justifiably so, especially if you look into how little the richest Americans pay in taxes.

According to an investigation by ProPublica put out in 2021, the 25 richest Americans had 401 billion dollars in income between 2014 and 2018, and paid just 3.4% in taxes on that income! Warren Buffett paid only 0.1%, Jeff Bezos paid just 0.98%, and Michael Bloomberg paid a grand total of 1.3%.

So how do they manage to avoid paying taxes on their income? Yes, the politicians have lowered the tax rate on the top income brackets in 1964 from 91% to 70%, then again in 1981 to 50%, and in 2018 to 37%. But the richest of the rich avoid even this 37%.

It’s also true that the highest capital gains tax rate is 20% and those with the highest incomes would pay an additional tax of 3.8%. To most of us, even that 23.8% rate seems pretty modest compared to what most workers pay. Another study by economists at University of California-Berkeley found that average Americans pay about 15% in income and payroll taxes, and that doesn’t even include things like sales taxes or gasoline taxes that hit workers and the poor harder than the rich.

The richest of the rich have found loopholes to avoid paying even these rates of taxes. They avoid receiving dividends on their stocks, instead pushing for companies to put the money into ways of driving up the prices of their stocks. Then they borrow money against the huge amounts they have in stocks from lenders that only require them to pay off the interest on the loans from year to year. They hold onto their stocks until they die and pass them on to their children or others who inherit from them.

Theoretically, there is supposed to be an inheritance tax of 40% on property over 15 million dollars. But if they break their wealth up into smaller pieces, their inheritors get a discount on that tax rate. When their children inherit their stock, they then only pay capital gains taxes based on the value of the stocks at the time they inherited them, not against the amount the person passing them on paid when they initially bought the stocks!

Their success in avoiding estate taxes shows in the amounts collected in estate taxes. In 2024, the richest 1% of Americans owned 50 trillion dollars in wealth. The estate tax raised only 30 billion dollars on that 50 trillion in 2024, or less than 0.1%.

So when there is no money for SNAP assistance or to provide money for schools, despite how much most workers are paying in taxes, it’s because the richest of the rich practically manage to avoid paying any taxes at all.