By Scott Burns

Responding to last Sunday’s column, many readers wrote to tell me that Occupy Wall Street was about a lot more than taxes.

It most certainly is. At its core it is about the imbalance of political power between the very rich and everyone else. It is about how those at the top of the food chain have used government to privatize gains and socialize losses. It is about how Wall Street occupied Washington long before Main Street tried to Occupy Wall Street.

The result, to paraphrase Jerry Reed’s famous C&W song, is that the big dogs got the gold mine and the rest of us got the shaft. Our economic recovery is slow because we’re down the shaft in home prices, 401(k) account values, yields on our savings and sales for small businesses. The consumer spending power that makes this economy go simply isn’t there.

The problem here is that wishful thinking about making everything better for the 99 percent by taxing the 1 percent simply won’t work. And that’s why I wrote about the actual income figures of the top 1 percent. If every dime of income earned by the top 1 percent were taxed at 100 percent, we’d still have a deficit.

The rich simply aren’t rich enough to pick up the slack. Indeed, all 100 percent of us aren’t rich enough to support the government we have and the promises our government has made. To have change that works, we need to understand the reality of income distribution so we can start cutting government spending.

Upscale magazines give us the impression that everyone is about to buy a $20,000 watch or a $100,000 world cruise. In fact, the market for these items is quite thin. They are totally out of reach for the vast majority of people. There is a reason supermarkets are well stocked with Velveeta.

If the top 1 percent can only make a minor contribution to closing the federal deficit, it is unlikely that the bottom 99 percent will be able to do much, either.

Here are the basics on the distribution of income in America:

• Bottom half households have incomes under $32,396. This is not much to live on if the household has any children. Most of these families can barely afford to keep a car on the road, let alone save or pay more taxes. Most are only a paycheck or emergency room visit away from disaster.
• Another quarter of all households have incomes between $32,396 and $66,193. Since their income is above the 50th percentile, they are our middle class. Yet few would assert that a household income of $60,000 provides a level of security that is “middle class.”
• Another 15 percent of all households— the 75th to 90th percentile— have incomes between $66,193 and $112,124. Many of these households achieve this level by pooling income from two jobs. How far that income goes depends very much on where you live and your work arrangements. A healthy $75,000 in Boston gives you a firm foothold in the top 20 percent— but it can be replaced by $50,358 in Waco, Texas. The wage base maximum for the employment tax is currently $106,800 so it is a sure thing that households in this bracket pay both the employment tax and the federal income tax on virtually every dime of income. Their effective tax rate on any increase in income is already 30 percent. They may seem affluent, but this group is already taxed heavily.
• Five percent of households have incomes from $112,124 to $154,643. Again, most households achieve this income by having two workers. They are likely carrying the full burden of the employment tax and paying a significant amount of income tax at a 25 percent rate. That makes their real marginal tax rate about 40 percent. One of the popular ideas in Washington is to raise the wage base maximum so this group would never escape the employment tax.
• The next 4 percent of households have incomes from $154,643 and $343,927. That’s a very nice income range, but lots of people in places like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle or Washington will tell you they can barely make ends meet and don’t know how they will send their kids to college.

The bottom line: Our country isn’t nearly as rich as the commitments it has made.