This is so horribly bad, it must be responded to. A family making $12,600 has one individual working only 40 hours a week for six dollars an hour. Assuming they have no income tax withheld, their social security withholding would be about 7%, or $882 a year. This leaves a maximym monthly take home pay of $976. Since they can only pay about 8% of their income in sales tax if they spend EVERY dime of it on a taxable item, then they must have another tax that is greater than 8% on some portion of their income.
This would have to be a property tax on their home. Does anyone believe a family making 12,600 a year could get a bank loan? Let's pretend for a minute that they could. Assume they spend 50% of their takehome pay on a house payment. For their total tax rate to be equal to 12% with half of it taxed at 8%, the other half would have to be taxed at 16%! ($2016 a year). If they are taxed at the high rate of $5 per $1000 of assesed value, the assesed value of the house would need to be $403,200!
Note that this assumes that the family spends NO money on untaxable services such as health care. This is OK though because such a family would be on TennCare and also on Food Stamps (though that would make it even more difficult to spend money on sales taxes!)
For the other family, we have $159,000 and only 4 percent ($6360) spent on state and local taxes. This is immediatly more likely since the federal government is going to take aoubt 30% of this families income right off the top, reducing their take to 111,300. This family also pays for it's own healthcare, say $500 a month reducing the state taxable amount to 105,300. To pay $6360 at 8% requires the expenditure of 79,500 (6,625 a month)on TAXABLE items leaving $25,800 to do somthing with besides tax, such as housinng, saving and investing. Don't forget though, that the investing is likely to be hit by the Hall Income Tax.
So it does seem possible the rich family might only pay four percent but it is subsidizing several of the poor families through it's high federal taxes. There is no way the poor family is paying 12.
And you know property taxes have skyrocketed here....from between 25-50% both commercially and residentially. Commercially, my property tax is now my biggest ticket after debt servicing...nearly 30% of my net cash flow. All for public schools we prefer not to use. It's always about the poor or the children when in reality it's only about the government's inability and lack of will to reel in spending. Naifeh, the Fords, Rochelle, Sundquist, Cohen....they are all lying, stealing charlatans. Tennessee really only has a few "leaders". The media sans Talk Radio is completely on the side of the "tax reform" liars.