re: In 2015, top 20% of income earners paid 83.9% of all federal income taxes

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I do have a problem with those same people MAKING money from various tax credits and the like.

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The problem is deductions vs credits.

You can't make money off of a deduction - only pay less.

A credit treats as if you paid that amount in taxes, so it basically tricks the system into thinking "Hey, you paid an extra $2000 because you made too little money".

OTOH, because of the weird way deductions work, I'm not surprised that's what they did. What they should have done is rework the tax code to make more sense, not keep building onto a broken system.