Posted on 07/21/2008 5:12:16 AM PDT by shrinkermd
...The nearby chart shows that the top 1% of taxpayers, those who earn above $388,806, paid 40% of all income taxes in 2006, the highest share in at least 40 years. The top 10% in income, those earning more than $108,904, paid 71%. Barack Obama says he's going to cut taxes for those at the bottom, but that's also going to be a challenge because Americans with an income below the median paid a record low 2.9% of all income taxes, while the top 50% paid 97.1%. Perhaps he thinks half the country should pay all the taxes to support the other half.
Aha, we are told: The rich paid more taxes because they made a greater share of the money. That is true. The top 1% earned 22% of all reported income. But they also paid a share of taxes not far from double their share of income. In other words, the tax code is already steeply progressive.
We also know from income mobility data that a very large percentage in the top 1% are "new rich," not inheritors of fortunes. There is rapid turnover in the ranks of the highest income earners, so much so that people who started in the top 1% of income in the 1980s and 1990s suffered the largest declines in earnings of any income group over the subsequent decade...
...If Mr. Obama does succeed in raising tax rates on the rich, we'd also wager that the rich share of tax payments would fall. The last time tax rates were as high as the Senator wants them -- the Carter years -- the rich paid only 19% of all income taxes, half of the 40% share they pay today.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
America is on a cusp. The liberals’ relentless insistence that America’s higher income earners pay an ever higher percentage of the income tax reveals their desire for America to abandon the Republic in favor of a Democracy.
This article reports that the top 50% of the nation’s wage earners pay 97.1% of the income tax. I have no good reason to doubt this data. I also have no good reason why the top 50% of the nation’s earners could not shoulder the remaining 2.9% of the income tax burden. America’s top 50% income earners will pay 100% of the nation’s income tax.
Having digested that for a bit surely it would not be too much to ask the top 49% of earners to pay 100% of the income tax. America will now have achieved the Democracy the founders so wanted the nation to avoid but the socialist and liberals have been driving us to. To the delight of the socialist and liberals, the bottom 51% of America’s earners will be able to tell the top 49% of America’s earners how much income tax they will pay and what to spend that tax on.
ROTFLM*O!!!!!! That IS a keeper!!! Thanks~!
The working “poor” would get all their FairTax rebated to them, wouldn’t they ? And the FairTax eliminates both the Income tax and the SS/M taxes.
Yet they would still get full credit for SS/M benefits, right ?
At least today, they might contribute something to SS/M, but under the FairTax they could easily contribute nothing at all.
And the “rich” could easily spend most of their money outside the country and legally avoid paying taxes altogether.
Sounds like the FairTax would have both “rich” and “poor” paying less — and that would leave just the “middle” to pay for everything.
A good first step would be to get people to make the distinction between “General Fund” spending (which is paid for by income taxes, excise taxes, and import duties) and “Social Insurance” benefits payments (which are paid for by mandatory FICA contributions from wages).
Why ? Because it is important that people realize the so-called “social security taxes” they think make them “taxpayers” are nothing of the kind. They don’t pay for a dime’s worth of national security, infrastructure, judiciary, etc. That money is loaned to the Treasury and may never be paid back, but at least on paper, it doesn’t pay for anything except the over-promised SS/M benefits.
I’d like people to talk about the two separate Federal Budgets again rather than lumping together “taxes and contributions” on one side and “spending and benefits payments” on the other.
Technically, that is not a tax, it is a rebate, or a refund. Taxes don't go into negative numbers, they go to zero, and anything less than that is technially a rebate.
Call it what you will, but I prefer “negative income tax”. It is income based, filed with tax forms and can bring a “refund” greater than the amount paid in.
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