As the IRS tax filing deadline looms, research shows over half of Americans approach the subject with frustration and envy but not about the taxes they pay.

Pew Research reports that about 61% of people feel some corporations and wealthy people don’t pay their fair share of taxes. Over half surveyed are frustrated that the system is so complicated, and only about 38% are concerned with how much taxes they pay.

For decades, the Left has been complaining that lower-income households pay way too much in taxes and the wealthier hardly pay any. It’s a lazy sentiment.

Sure, wealthy people with large stock portfolios can avoid capital gains taxes by holding on to those stocks. Elon Musk does this via Tesla. This isn’t cheating the system, however. It's smart. And the system is designed to facilitate investment in private enterprise, which is what stocks reflect in the first place.

However, the amount of even very wealthy people who earn their only incomes solely via stocks is very small. Most wealthy people own businesses or work an above-average earning job. But are wealthy people just avoiding taxes altogether? Of course not. According to the Tax Foundation , "The top 1% of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90% combined. The top 1% of taxpayers paid $723 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90% paid $450 billion." The National Taxpayers Union found similarly: "The top 10% of earners paid 74% of all income taxes and the top 25% paid 89%."

Leftist rhetoric encourages, even glamorizes, envy toward wealthy people. After all, wealth is often synonymous with capitalism and the Republican Party. The mere suggestion is a lazy farce and distracts people from questioning their own tax rates. This factor is obscured further by W2-based employments that automatically withhold one’s taxes: If everyone had to pay their taxes to the IRS regularly as self-employed people do, the public might riot!

Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She is an opinion columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.