AZGrizFan wrote:kalm wrote:
Given that we put 9/11, Katrina, and two wars on a credit card, wouldn't allowing the Bush Tax Cuts to expire be a redistribution of a redistribution?
Of course small businesses should be protected, but I don't feel sorry for multinational corporations and the uber rich. For many of them, taxes have been reduced and income has increased while the country crumbles.
Katrina Costs: $288 billion
9/11 costs: $100 billion
Iraq/Afghanistan: $1.2 trillion
Stimulus Plan: $787 billion
Oil Spill: $3 billion
Cash for Clunkers: $3 billion
Home Buyer Credit: $12.6 billion
Healthcare Costs: $950 billion
Unemployment Extension: $100 billion
....and on and on and on and on.....
And FYI Kalm, this country is crumbling because 47% of individuals pay NO taxes at all. This country is crumbling because more and more people expect the government to take care of them. This country is crumbling because we have a government that, instead of representing the will of the people (healthcare, immigration, stimulus packages) think THEY know what's best and pass legislation in the face of overwhelming disapproval from the voters.
This country is crumbling because of turds like you who think that people who make over $200,000 are the devil and must pay MORE than their fair share to maintain the infrastructure of this country.
Z, you should sometime try - what's that phrase you like - oh yeah, getting off of Wall Street's dick for awhile.
BTW, I guess you can lump Exxon into that 47% since they actually got money back from the government last year.
Even if the discussion is restricted to federal taxes (for which the statistics are better), a vast majority of households end up paying federal taxes. Congressional Budget Office data suggests that, at most, about 10 percent of all households pay no net federal taxes. The number 10 is obviously a lot smaller than 47.
The reason is that poor families generally pay more in payroll taxes than they receive through benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. It’s not just poor families for whom the payroll tax is a big deal, either. About three-quarters of all American households pay more in payroll taxes, which go toward Medicare and Social Security, than in income taxes.
Focusing on the statistical middle class — the middle 20 percent of households, as ranked by income — underlines this point. Households in this group made $35,400 to $52,100 in 2006, the last year for which the Congressional Budget Office has released data. That would describe a household with one full-time worker earning about $17 to $25 an hour. Such hourly pay is typical for firefighters, preschool teachers, computer support specialists, farmers, members of the clergy, mail carriers, secretaries and truck drivers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Taking into account both taxes and tax credits, the average household in this group paid a total income tax rate of just 3 percent. A good number of people, in fact, paid no net income taxes. They are among the alleged free riders.
But the picture starts to change when you look not just at income taxes but at all taxes. This average household would have paid 0.8 percent of its income in corporate taxes (through the stocks it owned), 0.9 percent in gas and other federal excise taxes, and 9.5 percent in payroll taxes. Add these up, and the family’s total federal tax rate was 14.2 percent.
I realize that it’s possible to argue that payroll taxes should be excluded from the discussion because they pay for benefits — Social Security and Medicare — that people receive on the back end. But that argument doesn’t seem very persuasive.
Why? People do not receive benefits equal to the payroll taxes they paid. Those who die at age 70 will receive much less in Social Security and Medicare than they paid in taxes. Those who die at 95 will probably get much more.
The different kinds of federal taxes are really just accounting categories. At the end of the day, the government has to cover the cost of all its operations with revenue from all its taxes. We can’t wish our deficit away by saying that it’s mostly a Medicare and Social Security deficit.
If anything, the government numbers I’m using here exaggerate how much of the tax burden falls on the wealthy. These numbers fail to account for the income that is hidden from tax collectors — a practice, research shows, that is more common among affluent families. “Because higher-income people are understating their income,” Joel Slemrod, a tax scholar at the University of Michigan, says, “We’ve been overstating their average tax rates.”
State and local taxes, meanwhile, may actually be regressive. That is, middle-class and poor families may face higher tax rates than the wealthy. As Kim Rueben of the Tax Policy Center notes, state and local income taxes and property taxes are less progressive than federal taxes, while sales taxes end up being regressive. The typical family pays a lot of state and local taxes, too — almost half as much as in federal taxes.
There is no question that the wealthy pay a higher overall tax rate than any other group. That is an American tradition. But there is also no question that their tax rates have fallen more than any other group’s over the last three decades. The only reason they are paying more taxes than in the past is that their pretax incomes have risen so rapidly — which hardly seems a great rationale for a further tax cut.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/busin ... hardt.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Do ya think the wealthy are really complaining about having to pay more of the taxes?
