Originally Posted by slapass

SS is only on the first 70k. If the person makes their money from investments, they don't pay SS or Medicare on that money. So high earners would not pay 50%.

Then do the Hedge fund trick and it all drops to 20%(was 15%) with no SS or Medicare. But even with lots of dividends or long term capital gains it is still then 20% without those other two taxes.

So California from what I could find Capital Gains tax rate with Federal tax is 31.2%.
Source - http://heartland.org/sites/default/f...ains_final.pdf

This is the reasoning behind tax the rich. But no one wants to really tax the rich so they raised the income tax which won't hardly effect anyone but high earners of the working class.