Posted on 12/17/2007 11:22:19 AM PST by shrinkermd
Somewhere between $120,000 and $200,000, I wager
Ummmmm, no.
The article clearly states that the top 1.3 million taxpayers (i.e. the top 1%) all have adjusted gross incomes GT $365K or more..
True enough. However:
What percentage of the nation's wealth might be owned is completely irrelevant.
It's not irrelevant. When the article talks about the "richest" citizens, that refers to wealth (unless they've come up with a new definition of "rich"--see post 12, ping to those whom I'm referencing). Now if by "richest" they for some reason mean "highest income" then you are absolutely correct. However, if they are using the word in the way it is normally defined... then yes, the statistics about wealth distribution become wholly relevant to the discussion.
Now let's assume, for the sake of argument, that they actually do intend for "richest" to mean "highest income". Then we would still need to know an income (instead of wealth) distribution to draw any meaningful conclusions from the data that was posted.
It doesn’t say that’s the top 1% though. Maybe that’s a fact they intended to put in, but forgot?
before you say that
I am in a high income bracket (not quite the top 1%) and my marginal tax rate is now close to 50%. If I need to bring $1 into my budget for something, I need to earn $2 to have it left over after paying taxes on it. No one is crying for me and I don’t expect them to, but being just inside the higher tax brackets is brutal. All your deductions roll off, and the tax rate just keeps climbing.
I paid somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of my gross, not net income last year in state and federal taxes alone. Would you like the government to take one out of every 3 dollars you earn? And that doesn’t count FICA, sales tax, etc. Now the dems want to raise my tax bracket. I may quit working altogether - I’m sick of it
The govenrment isn’t working all night long, on holidays and weekends after paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the education to put you in that bracket in the first place. I don’t mind paying my fair share, but the taxes on the upper brackets are far from fair, and not all of us are Warren Buffet
/rant off
“You can start by eliminating the ‘reverse tax’ Earned Income Credit.”
What’s really, really bad is that there are lots of illegals that are getting the “credit” too. All the have to do is get a tax id number to file for it. What they do is get several tax id numbers under different aliases. And to think how many years I busted my butt working. Why bother?
Oy vey. I guess the Wall Street Journal doesn't realize that, prior to the Bush tax cuts, the top 1% were paying more than 39% of the taxes.
Seems like the WSJ is trying to keep up with the rest of the MSM.
Here ya go:
...The 1% of households with the highest income paid 39% of all income taxes.
...The 5% of households with the highest income paid a tad less than 60% of all income taxes.
...And the richest 10% of households paid 70% of all income taxes.
Indeed. I worked in NYC for some time, and probably would have been considered rich by some politicians (I’m not). I figured after the average FIT take from my pay, the NY state income tax, and for a time, a small NYC commuter tax, plus the FICA, my average income tax rate was about 40%.
With the remaining 60%, I got to pay a 8.75% sales tax in my ex-county, property taxes (which on Long Island are really high), and a slew of miscellaneous taxes (phone, cell phone, utility, gasoline (federal and state)), plus all of the hidden taxes in the form of higher utility bills (since govt really likes to stick the electric utilities with high taxes, so people don’t know that part of their electric bill goes indirectly to the govt.).
In total, I estimated about 60% of my total gross income went to taxes.
I left NYS and now live in a much, much lower tax state, but I’m probably still paying about half of my income in taxes.
And, Hillary, Obama and Edwards want much, much more, for their programs. Those idiots may incent me to retire before I’d really like to, because I won’t work 65+ hour weeks for them. I came to this country as an immigrant, with nothing. I just worked and obeyed the rules and was reasonably successful — God bless America. Now, these pandering politicians want to punish people like me, so that they can gain political office.
The issue here is income not payroll tax. Medicare and FICA are related to retirement benefits so income taxes should not be combined with payroll taxes. As it is now, Medicare taxes are unlimited so the wealthy are paying very high Medicare taxes without any increase in retirement medical benefits.
I've always liked the idea of weighing votes based on total taxes paid, like shares of stock in a corporation.
Don't pay taxes? Don't vote. Don't pay taxes, but get tax money put back in your pocket? Tell us who you support and they lose votes :)
That is about the dumbest and most anti-democratic idea I have ever heard. Our system would look like the late Roman empire in its years of decline, with a few people at the public trough controlling the votes that get them the money.
Your assumption is that in a modern industrial state money is distributed according to productivity, but I think that notion is subject to very very serious challenge.
“What’s really, really bad is that there are lots of illegals that are getting the “credit” too. All the have to do is get a tax id number to file for it. What they do is get several tax id numbers under different aliases. And to think how many years I busted my butt working. Why bother?”
To get EITC you have to have a valid Social Security Number issued by the SSA.
No, a Flat percentage is still Marxist, since you are taking more from one person than another — with no reason other than their differing abilities.
Those government services which provide the protections under the Constitution are applied equally to every citizen. You cannot defend the country and claim to be defending one man more than another. Therefor the correct “fair share” would be to divide the cost of government equally amongst the citizens — without regard to their income or property. Leaving SS and Medicare out since they have their own funding source, the general fund required $1.2T in 2006. That is $4,000 each from every man, woman, and child. That is the tax bill we should each be paying.
If we eliminated all the welfare programs and other unconstituional spending, we’d have needed only $750B, which would be $2,500 from each man, woman, and child. That’s $50 bucks a week to be a citizen. Seems a fair price.
You can’t count the FICA taxes. Somebody earning $40,000 is really not paying anything in FICA “taxes” because he has been promised he’ll get it all back with interest. Maybe the promise will go bust, but it is not a “tax” so much as a mandatory “retirement plan contribution”. As long as the promise is kept, he’ll make out as though his money was invested at 7% interest.
Somebody earning above the $40,000 mark sees a worse return on his “contribution”, to the point where people that exceed the SS cutoff cap by earning more than $97,400 have gotten screwed completely. They will never get back all the money that was taken, and their “interest” earned will be a negative 2%. To them, FICA really is a “Tax”.
And Medicare tax has no cap. Pity the guy that earned $5M a year and had to pay $150,000 a year for crappy Medicare insurance no better than anybody else that paid a lot less for it.
I was talking about comparing those numbers (the tax distribution) to the actual wealth and/or income distributions.
For example: Under a flat tax, if the top 1% of households earned 39% of the national income, then it would follow that the same 1% of households would pay 39% of the nation's income tax. So even under a "fair" tax system like a flat tax, the numbers that the WSJ provides would still be possible, depending on the income distribution. Thus, the assertion:
"Based on the latest available tax data, no Administration in modern history has done more to pry tax revenue from the wealthy."
does not follow simply from the tax data that was provided.
Before I feel sorry for them, what percent of all income did they receive the year before?
“... to live in a free country, he is getting more of a benefit out of it as well.”
How is he getting more of a benefit ? Are you placing a price on a man’s freedom ? I argue that freedom is just as valuable to a poor man as it is to a rich man.
Marxism comes in two pieces — first you take away an amount based on ability, then you distribute according to need. Marxism doesn’t say anything about people having to be poor. It also doesn’t say they should be equal. It says “according to their needs” and was always a con game where somebody can dictate that one person has larger needs than another.
So one valid but stolen SSA number and five valid ones for the anchor babies and an illegal alien gets the EITC, foodstamps, Medicaid, free school lunches, and so on ?
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