Dear Toddsterpatriot,
"Relax Comrade. Even if the soldiers were paying taxes, Bill Gates made $1,000,000 in salary last year. That puts him in the 35% tax bracket. Plus 15% of any capital gains on MSFT stock sales. The average soldier is in the 10% or 15% tax bracket."
Mr. Gates also receives modest dividends of 32 cents per share on his shares in Microsoft. Yahoo! Finance reports that he owns about 1 billion shares (which seems very low to me, but who knows?). He thus receives about $300 million in dividends annually, taxed at 15%, federal rate.
However, to offset his federal income taxes, he has his contributions to charity, which over the last 10 years or so have probably exceeded his actual taxable income (since he gives away shares of Microsoft, and thus gets a deduction at the full market value). I don't know how that intersects with the AMT, but I imagine that he doesn't quite pay the entire 15% on the $300 million.
sitetest
IIRC, there is a limit to the charitable deduction. And the AMT is 26% or 28%. So anyone dumb enough to think a soldier in Iraq pays more in taxes than Bill Gates is probably too dumb to cross the street.