Rich Already Pay More
Dear Editor,
Fewer things make me more upset than when I hear these leftist crybabies whine about the rich not paying their fair share. Full disclosure – I am not wealthy. Like the majority of us I work hard for what I do make and I hate seeing my tax dollars being wasted on what Sen. Kennedy (R. La.) describes as bovine waste.
What the leftists can’t seem to grasp is that the wealthy already pay more than their fair share. The editor can correct me if I’m wrong but, if I’m not mistaken, the most recent data indicates that the top 10 percent pay 90 percent of this country’s tax burden with the top 1 percent picking up over 50 percent. How much more do you leftist fools want? If you are wanting fairness then you should be advocates of a flat tax rate that is fair to everyone from top to bottom. Using 10 percent as a base figure, for every $10 you make, you pay a dollar.
Now, I don’t mind helping those who genuinely need help. That said, no one owes me a living and I owe no one else a living. Help those who really need help. At the same time trim out all the leeches, parasites and other assorted slackers and slouches. The only help they need is a good hard swift kick in the backside!
Jim Bailey
Amen!!!
“If the U.S. tax system were perfectly flat, the share of taxes paid by each group of Americans above would be equal to their share of income.
Instead, the top 1 percent — with an average income of about $2 million — made 20.9 percent of America’s income, but paid 24.1 percent of America’s taxes. Few people will perceive this as a monstrous injustice…
…The right aims its propaganda at the federal income tax because it is one of the few parts of the U.S. tax system that is strongly progressive. You will grow old and gray waiting for conservatives to expound on the unfairness of sales taxes.
Their goal is to mislead Americans enough that they’ll acquiesce to further cuts in the federal income tax rate. If they succeed, the U.S. tax system will grow ever flatter, or even perhaps become regressive — that is, with poorer Americans paying a higher tax rate than the rich. Don’t fall for it…”
Corporatist’s “propaganda using extremely misleading statistics to claim that the U.S. tax system is soaking the rich. It’s not.”
Jon SchwarzJon Schwarz: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/13/tax-day-taxes-statistics/
IF YOU LISTEN to Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council in the Trump White House, or Trump Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, or Karl Rove, or former GOP Speaker of the House John Boehner, or 2012 Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, or Gretchen Carlson, or the Wall Street Journal, or Bloomberg News, or the Tax Foundation, or the Heritage Foundation, or Fox, or Fox, or Fox, or just any elderly white relatives who forward you chain emails, you’ve probably encountered statistics like this:
• The top 1 percent of American earners pay almost 40 percent of all federal income taxes. That’s more than the bottom 90 percent pay combined!
• The top 20 percent of Americans pay almost 90 percent of all federal income taxes.
• The bottom 50 percent of Americans pay just 3 percent of federal income taxes. That’s less than the top 0.001 percent — just 1,400 taxpayers or so — who pay a bit over 3 percent of all federal income taxes.
Liberals see these numbers and think: This can’t possibly be right. Yet it is. All of the above is completely accurate.
Conservatives love these numbers, because the implication is clear: The libs want to soak the rich, but the rich are already soaking wet. And now fringe extremists like like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez want the government’s grasping hand to take even more from the heroic job creators who are generously supporting the rest of us!
So what’s going on here?
The answer: This is a classic example of how to lie with statistics. It’s shameless but effective propaganda, which is why the people with the most to gain from it pay propagandists to spread it widely. Anyone pushing this is trying to fool you, and you should ignore anything they say on any subject.
There are two main aspects to the deception.
First, these numbers refer only to federal income taxes. Both the federal and the income part are important.
The income tax is not the only tax collected by the federal government — far from it. Just half of the taxes collected by the federal government come from the income tax. About a third come from payroll taxes — which fall much more heavily on working people, since they’re largely levied only on the first $130,000 or so of earned income.
This means the rich pay a far lower payroll tax rate than regular people. A nurse making a salary of $50,000 per year pays (counting both the employee and employer side) 12.4 percent in OASDI taxes (for Social Security and disability insurance). But a sitcom star making a thousand times that, or $50 million a year, will pay the 12.4 percent only on the initial $130,000 of their salary, working out to a total OASDI tax rate of just 0.03 percent on their $50 million. And because OASDI taxes are only levied on earned income — meaning, money you make from a job — a billionaire investor with a $50 million annual income from dividends and capital gains will pay exactly zero percent in OASDI taxes.
Then there’s the fact that it’s not just the federal government that taxes Americans. There are also many, many state and local taxes: State income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and more. Some of these, such as sales taxes, are actually regressive — i.e., the less money you make, the higher tax rate you have to pay.
Second, the wealthy naturally pay a disproportionate share of federal income taxes because they make a disproportionate share of the country’s income. In other words, these numbers to some degree demonstrate exactly the opposite of what those who use them claim: They’re not an indication that the superrich are beleaguered, but are in part a sign of America’s staggering wealth inequality.
It is true that the federal income tax is still significantly progressive — that is, the tax rate is higher on higher income. But as Thomas Jefferson would tell you, this is exactly what should happen in a country like the U.S. Jefferson wrote this to James Madison in 1785 from monarchical France: “The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands … the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property. … [One means is] to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.” Adam Smith also believed in progressive taxes.
So what does the overall U.S. tax system look like when you take all of this into account?
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, or ITEP, a progressive Washington, D.C. think tank, is the only organization that studies this in detail. Each year, they publish a report called “Who Pays Taxes in America?”
This graph is taken from their latest edition and is a projection for 2019.
chart-1-1555038429Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy Tax Model, April 2019
What this shows is that, when you take all U.S. taxes into account — federal income taxes, federal payroll taxes, federal corporate taxes, the federal estate tax, federal excise taxes, and the plethora of state and local taxes — the U.S. tax system is just mildly progressive.
If the U.S. tax system were perfectly flat, the share of taxes paid by each group of Americans above would be equal to their share of income.
Instead, the top 1 percent — with an average income of about $2 million — made 20.9 percent of America’s income, but paid 24.1 percent of America’s taxes. Few people will perceive this as a monstrous injustice.
Meanwhile, the middle 20 percent of Americans— with incomes between $41,000 and $66,000 per year — make 10.9 percent of America’s income and pay 9.4 percent of America’s taxes. The bottom 20 percent, making less than $23,000, make just 2.8 percent of America’s income and pay 2 percent of America’s taxes. That is, the “lucky duckies” of the right’s imagination who pay little to nothing in income taxes are still paying a significant portion of their income in taxes overall.
The same data can also be looked at like this, also from the ITEP report:
chart-2-1555038431Source: Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy Tax Model, April 2019
Again, this shows that the U.S. tax system overall is slightly progressive. The top 1 percent pays a total of 33.7 percent of their income in taxes — a bit more than those just below them on the income scale and more than the middle class, but not by much. Meanwhile, even the poorest Americans are paying a significant chunk of their income in taxes.
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The upshot of all of this is straightforward. The right aims its propaganda at the federal income tax because it is one of the few parts of the U.S. tax system that is strongly progressive. You will grow old and gray waiting for conservatives to expound on the unfairness of sales taxes.
Their goal is to mislead Americans enough that they’ll acquiesce to further cuts in the federal income tax rate. If they succeed, the U.S. tax system will grow ever flatter, or even perhaps become regressive — that is, with poorer Americans paying a higher tax rate than the rich. Don’t fall for it.”
“You will grow old and gray waiting for conservatives to expound on the unfairness of sales taxes.”
That’s because no matter how much we hate sales taxes, they are not inherently unfair. If you purchase a circular saw at Walmart, the sales tax will be exactly the same as I would pay or even a rich person would pay.
Got any more straw men to put up against the truth?
Dude writes a dissertation and Wayne thinks a one-liner will disarm him. Brah….
I don’t need to write a dissertation to rebut his false premise. And you don’t need to read one to know that his premise was false.
Sadly, your rebut was a dud. Mile Pwned you. His premise was true AF.
Amen to Jim Bailey’s letter of MAY 3rd….A Flat Tax is a sensible, fair way to tax.
Hai,
I Jim Baleiy and I no good smart brain things like maths.
Sorry for dummy head post.
Sinisterly,
Jimbo Baleiy
See Jim, the problem with a flat tax rate is that about 30,000,000 people don’t make enough money to survive, for whatever reason. Maybe it’s misfortune, poor choices, lack of hard work (although data shows that hard work doesn’t actually pay nearly as wel as just starting with more money, thanks mommy and daddy!), or some combination of causes. But you’re asking those 30,000,000 people to try to pay what is a much more meaningful dollar to them than the EXTREMELY WEALTHY that even after paying 50% of their income for the public good will still have enough money leftover to feed thousands of those poverty stricken families for a year.
But yes, let’s just cut it to a flat 10%. We can stop having a military, literally defund our police and our schools, our farmers will lose their massive subsidies, and we’ll just turn off all electricity after 9pm to save on the bills.
I did not say that I support a flat tax. I used that to make a point to those who choose to holler “unfair” and also champion redistribution as a way to solve the problem. As for defunding the military, the police, the schools, and cutting off electricity, that is a red herring that has long been discredited. Those organizations will exist because society demands then, irregardless of whether that society is market-based or sociocommunistic.
Then what do you support, if not the example you gave? You railed about the current tax system, offered a different system, but then say that’s not what you support?
So what do you support? Seems like a pretty important stance to take and without taking it you’re just another complainer.
You’re right, society demands those services. So what is your plan to still provide all of that while: (1) reducing tax revenue by taxing the wealthy less, (2) accounting for continuous increasing demand for services because of simple population growth, and (3) accounting for new needs as society changes over the longer term?
As you’ve already said, you don’t support anything you just don’t want rich people to pay extra taxes simply because they are able to. That’s a fair stance, but I disagree with it.
Ironic that history lesson of history repeating itself is soon forgotten. The point you make brings back the years of business’ moving overseas. As do their owners. Ca. and NY are “fleeing” in large numbers. When those who are recipients of this supposed fleecing of the so called rich then become the fleeced, therein lies the irony. No foresight or memory of the past in these marvelous United States. Education really adds to perspective that all sides to a problem as well as those many viable solutions is the better path to solve problems. THese handouts will be paid by those into the late 2000’s yrs. such a waste of our freedoms, such a waste to become the “tick” on the hound who contributes so much to our lives.
Also, don’t make up stats. The top 1% account for about 21% of income and 24% of taxes paid. Source: INSTITUTE ON TAXATION AND ECONOMIC POLICY
INSTITUTE ON TAXATION AND ECONOMIC POLICY is a liberal think tank. Take it with a grain of salt.
Which part are you refuting? The fact that 21% of earnings account for 24% of tax revenue? Yeah, didn’t think so – you know that’s true and accurate and think just because the source is a liberal group that many folks will discard it as false propaganda. I’ll say it again:
THE TOP 1% EARN 21% OF ALL THE MONEY AND PAY 24% OF AL THE TAXES.
You sound like a Libertarian. The LEFT uses these tactics to divide us, and to create envy.
How about we taxpayers all start working on a cash basis and avoid paying that God awful income tax. You see, during the Civil War Congress passed the Revenue Act of 1861 which included a tax on personal incomes to help pay war expenses (Thank you Abraham Lincoln). The tax was repealed ten years later. However, in 1894 Congress enacted a flat rate Federal income tax, which was ruled unconstitutional the following year by the U.S. Supreme Court because it was a direct tax not apportioned according to the population of each state. Then “we the people” got gored in 1913 when income tax was promulgated by our federal legislators. Wonder what would happen if the 10 percent who pay taxes suddenly vanished?
AMEN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Amazon should have paid over 2bn in federal taxes in 2019, but do to loop holes and fancy footwork accounting Amazon paid nothing. Not a penny. Not a cent. Sure, probably some other kind of tax was paid along the way, but federal taxes? Not a penny. I’m sure the majority of the readership of this rag loves that! But I personally hate it. I pay taxes. I work my butt off and still pay. Whatever, that is really life. Except the rich won’t pay and that screws us all. I’m sure you trump sycophants LOVE THAT.
Amazon and it’s founder Jeff Bezos get whatever they want from our liberal politicians. Why? They want him to put distribution centers in their states, which leads to hiring people, which leads to creating jobs, which leads to local/state taxes. . . .see how this works?
Well stated Jim!