Posted on 12/17/2007 11:22:19 AM PST by shrinkermd
Every Democrat running for President wants to raise taxes on "the rich," but they will have to do something miraculous to outtax President Bush. Based on the latest available tax data, no Administration in modern history has done more to pry tax revenue from the wealthy.
Last week the Congressional Budget Office joined the IRS in releasing tax numbers for 2005, and part of the news is that the richest 1% paid about 39% of all income taxes that year. The richest 5% paid a tad less than 60%, and the richest 10% paid 70%. These tax shares are all up substantially since 1990, and even somewhat since 2000. Meanwhile, Americans with an income below the median -- half of all households -- paid a mere 3% of all income taxes in 2005. The richest 1.3 million tax-filers -- those Americans with adjusted gross incomes of more than $365,000 in 2005 -- paid more income tax than all of the 66 million American tax filers below the median in income. Ten times more.
...More than 13 million American households, or about one in 10, had an income of more than $100,000 a year in 2005. This is the kind of upward mobility that a dynamic society should want because it means that incomes aren't stagnant and opportunity continues to exist.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
What is the break down for all government income?
The bottom 50% do not pay anything close to "zero" thanks to innumerable other federal taxes including FICA, Medicare, Gas Tax, Liquor Tax, Airline Ticket Tax, Tobacco Taxes, etc. This is to say nothing of the imputed burden of indirect taxes like the Corporate Income Tax and Import Tarriffs.
A guy making $40,000 a year may only pay $1000 or so to the Income Tax, but he pays three times as much - about $3000 just to Medicare and FICA. If he likes to smoke and drink and drives a lot to get to work, he can easily rack up a thousand more in excise taxes. Most families earning an average income end up shelling out 20-30% of their income in taxes of various kinds.
The only people truly paying almost nothing are those on welfare and in dead-end minimum wage jobs. Maybe 10-15% of the population at most is in such circumstances.
Really, what a dumb comment!
Looking at it from a somewhat heretical viewpoint, if you tax seheltered the base amount from everyone’s income that was determined regionally to be required for a decent stnadard of living and then taxed the excess at an equal percentage. I would imagine that the poor probably pay a higher percentage of that income in taxes.
There’s a big difference in paying 35% of their income and 35% of their “taxable” income.
thank you for enlightenment.
So, let me restate. When a majority of voters have little or no federal income tax liability, we as a society are in trouble.
;-)
By standard definitions, only marginally so, since the rates went from 15% to 39.6% to 10% to 35%. The amount of tax paid by each bracket has nothing to do with progressivity as normally defined, which is the rate of taxation.
(I’m not saying I agree with highly progressive tax codes, just that the “tax cuts for the rich” were anything but.)
The Bush tax cuts were major cuts for people earning high salary incomes and people with children. For everyone else, the cuts were relatively minor. For the Republicans, thats fine because their major constiuencies are the middle class with families and relatively well-to-do entreprenuers and corporate managers.
This is why I don't understand the resistance among Republicans to treating Hedge Fund income, for example, as salary and not capital gains. Its not as though most of these rich northeasterners from Manhattan and Greenwich and Left Coast types from LA and the Silicon Valley vote Republican.
A smart party taxes its opponents constituents. A dumb party taxes its own constituents. This is why the AMT conundrum is so funny. Most of the people it is about to hurt are Democrats who live in high tax states and are always whining about wanting more taxes, which is why Republicans are in no rush to help them out of their pickle. Republicans ought to be looking into things like higher taxes on income for Hollywood types and rich leftists like Buffet and urbanites and more tax cuts for families and small businessmen and people living in rural and exurban areas.
The higher bracket folks are still paying a disproportinate amount than middle or lower.
Rich to Democrats means high income, not high wealth.
Trust fund babies interning at some social do-good non-profit are not “rich” because they only earn a pittance even if they have $10 million in the bank.
Pardon, that has nothing to do with my question?
No, I think you are wrong. Most people - 85% or so, feel overburdened by taxes. Just because the most burdensome taxes at the lower end of the income scale are FICA and the Property Tax and State Income Tax doesn’t mean we should write such people off. There is just little motivation for them to worry about the Federal Income Tax and how the Democrats have forced it to be most burdensome to families earning between $125,000 and $500,000.
A broad based tax revolt will occur when we stop focusing on the Income Tax and its bad effects on the 5th to 15th percentile of the income scale and focus on reducing the total tax burden against the 15% or so of the population that is leaches.
Only in the income tax. But the overall burden quickly evens out thanks to FICA, Property Taxes, Sales Taxes, Excise Taxes, etc. People get so narrowly focused on the Income Tax they miss the big picture of just how large the government has gotten.
People at the lower end of the scale got a bigger % tax cut than the “rich:. That’s a fact go check it out
However, the editorial was about federal income taxes, period. Not corporate taxes, hidden taxes in the form of higher costs for goods, FICA, property taxes, etc. If you mean that taxes are not as progressive when FICA, sales taxes, property taxes, etc. are included then I agree.
My point is that when many voters have minimal federal income tax liability, they are likely to vote for more and more social programs. Politicians are already pandering, FYI. When more and more people are convinced that "others" will pay the bill, we have trouble.
Psssssssssssst!
It's an income tax. It's not a "wealth" tax.
What percentage of the nation's wealth might be owned is completely irrelevant.
But at what point does the highest 1% start?
Somewhere between $120,000 and $200,000, I wager, but the more interesting question to me would be whether Warren Buffett is paying a higher percentage of his income in taxes than those who earn only a measily $300,000 per year, which is a tiny fraction of what he earns. He’s always talking about how the “rich” should pay higher taxes, but he has not taken up the cause of whether billionaires should pay higher taxes than people who earn only $300,000 per year.
I'll bet it's higher than the taxes.
And 535 out of 300,000,000 Americans of the United States (.0001783%) get to decide how 100% of that federal income tax gets spent.
-ccm
The economically illiterate Democrats think they are doing their constituents a favor when they raise corporate taxes. TANSTAAFL.
-ccm
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.