Editing Openai/69585baf-7fb8-8012-907c-372b92368fe6 (section)

==== 🧮 3. What About the “Top 10%” Specifically? ====

The official statutory top marginal rate applies to the very highest brackets and is often used as a proxy for how “rich” taxpayers are taxed. While the IRS doesn’t set a public yearly “top 10% rate,” historically:
* When statutory top rates were high (e.g., >90% in 1940s–50s), most of the top 10% earned far less than that threshold, so their effective rates were significantly lower. Wikipedia<ref>{{cite web|title=Wikipedia|url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_United_States|publisher=en.wikipedia.org|access-date=2026-01-03}}</ref>
* Today’s top bracket (~37%) broadly captures much of the true top 1% and very high earners — though the effective tax rate for the top 10% as a group is typically lower because many forms of income are taxed differently (capital gains vs ordinary income). Econometrics Laboratory<ref>{{cite web|title=Econometrics Laboratory|url=https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/course/Labortaxes/taxableincome/taxableincome_attach.pdf|publisher=Econometrics Laboratory|access-date=2026-01-03}}</ref>