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| 7/12 |
| 2002/1/27-28 [Reference/Tax] UID:23682 Activity:very high |
1/25 WSJ provides numbers on who pays what taxes.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95001783
\_ for those who don't want to register, use root@127.0.0.1 as the
email address.
\_ Lying with statistics. The super-rich proportion of income has
grown faster than their tax burden. For anothoer perspecitve:
http://www.centeronbudget.org/5-31-01tax-pr.htm
\_ Yes, lots of lies in there. Like after-tax income for the
bottom 20% fell, but they don't say that government aid has
increased by a much larger percentage. Anytime someone talks
about "gaps" between one group of people and another one might
ask one's self what, if anything, the people on the bottom end
have done for themselves to improve their situation. Lobbying
government for wealth transfer through targeted higher taxes
on other people doesn't count as doing something to improve
one's self.
one's self. What kills me about these things is they compare
absolute numbers but don't take inflation into account. If I
was making 1000 in 1979 and you were making 100 and then in 97
I was making 1250 and you were making 200, then I've lost ground
even though I've widened the gap. Statistical lies, indeed. Be
careful how you read these things.
\_ Who said they didnt take inflation into acocunt?
Articles usually get that right but miss more subtle
things.
"after-tax income grew an average of 157 percent over
this period for the top one percent of the popula-
tion, rose a modest 10 percent"
\_ aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent.
Forty percent of all people know that.
have done for themselves to improve their situation.
\_ one of the great myths of the selfish conservative is
that poor people "want to" be poor. -tom
\_ Then YOU give them your money you fucking pussy.
Lobbying
government for wealth transfer through targeted higher taxes on
other people doesn't count as doing something to improve one's
self. What kills me about these things is they compare absolute
numbers but don't take inflation into account. If I was making
1000 in 1979 and you were making 100 and then in 97 I was making
1250 and you were making 200, then I've lost ground even though
I've widened the gap. Statistical lies, indeed. Be careful how
you read these things. |
| 7/12 |
|
| www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=95001783 This offers what Teddy's Harvard tutors would have called a teaching moment--maybe even for the Senator, if he cared to learn, but at least for American taxpayers who are too busy making a living to follow the details. So here are the taxing facts, courtesy of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, which coaxed the data for 1999 out of the IRS. Start with the richest of the rich, the top 1% of all earners. You read that correctly: The superrich pay in taxes nearly double their proportion of national income. The top 1% of tax filers are also paying a much higher share than they used to: About 20 years ago they paid only 19% of all federal income taxes. He already has a tax system in which a mere 5% of all earners pay more than half of all taxes, and he wants to soak them some more? From 1989 to 1999, the share of total taxes paid by the entire top 50% was largely unchanged. But the share paid by the top 10% of filers jumped by 19%, the share paid by the top 5% leapt by 26%, and the share paid by the top 1% soared by more than 43%. The Kennedy and Tom Daschle Democrats describe President Bush's tax cuts as a huge drain on the Treasury. The Bush cuts are the minimum needed to offset the economic forces and tax policies that have been raising American tax burdens to record levels. It starts with economic growth kicking more and more taxpayers into higher and higher tax brackets. This is known as bracket creep, and all the Bush tax cut does is offset its inexorable grip on ever more taxpayers. Targeted tax breaks--the personal exemption or itemized deductions--are also phased out as income grows. This is a double-whammy: Each new dollar of income is taxed by the ruling marginal rate and taxed again by the reduction of credits, exemptions and deductions. According to the 1999 IRS numbers, all you had to earn to be among the top 25% of all tax filers was a whopping $52,965. The 27% marginal tax rate kicks in for single taxpayers at only $27,050 of income. About 30% had increased their income to become the top one-fifth of all earners. Kennedy liberals prefer to ignore this truth about income mobility because it means their main political claim is false. They want voters to believe that the only people being taxed at these rates are the Trumps and Rockefellers. But what really happens is that the higher rates end up soaking essentially middle class people whose incomes rise during their careers until they end up paying the same tax rate as the Kennedys, though they still can't afford to sail off Cape Cod. By calling for a tax hike, he hopes to shift the national debate to the left and make it that much harder to cut taxes any further. Which is all the more reason for tax cutters to point out how much the government soaks both rich and middle class alike. |
| www.centeronbudget.org/5-31-01tax-pr.htm In percentage terms, after-tax income grew an average of 157 percent over this period for the top one percent of the population, rose a modest 10 percent -- about one-half of one percent per year -- for the 20 percent of Americans in the middle of the income spectrum and was effectively unchanged for those in the bottom fifth. Average After-Tax Income Gains, 1979-97 Top 1% $414,200 Middle fifth $3,400 Bottom fifth -$100 The study shows that income gaps both between rich and poor and between the rich and the middle class widened in the 1980s and 1990s alike and reached their widest point on record in 1997. By one key measure, the percentage of income paid in federal taxes fell the most for those with the highest incomes. The CBO study blends Census and IRS data, counts non-cash benefits as income, and subtracts the taxes that households pay. Researchers and experts in the field regard the CBO data as providing the most comprehensive and reliable information on income trends. CBO developed the data in this study after consultation with many of the nation's leading experts on income measurement. Figure 1 Income Gaps Continued to Widen in the 1990s The CBO data show that the greatest increase in income disparities for any two-year period the study covers occurred between 1995 and 1997, the last two years for which the study provides data on incomes. In this two-year period alone, the average income of the top one percent of households jumped 40 percent, or $194,000. This suggests the growth in income disparities between the wealthiest individuals and other Americans may have accelerated in the latter half of the 1990s. Declines in Tax Burdens Data in the CBO study put to rest several claims frequently heard in political circles, such as that income disparities widened in the 1980s but stopped growing in the 1990s and that the share of income that different groups of Americans pay in taxes has been rising and has increased the most for those with the highest incomes. The data CBO presents show such statements are not accurate. For example, the study shows that every group of households now pays a lower percentage of income in federal taxes than in 1979. The data in the study consequently show that this group had already received large tax reductions before enactment of the tax-cut legislation that Congress approved last week, which will provide extremely large additional tax cuts to these households. The CBO study also found that while taxpayers with very high incomes now pay a larger share of total federal taxes than in earlier years, this is because they receive a much larger share of the national income. Similarly, the 20 percent of Americans with the highest incomes received as much as the other 80 percent of the population. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysts noted that the tax-cut legislation President Bush is about to sign will further widen the income gaps between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of the population. The top one percent will receive an average tax cut of more than $46,000 from the legislation when the tax cuts are fully in effect, compared to an average tax cut of $600 for the middle fifth of the population and less than $70 for the bottom fifth. The average percentage gain in after-tax income that households will receive when the tax-cut legislation is fully in effect will be about three times greater for those in the top one percent of the population than for those in the middle fifth and more than seven times greater for those at the top than for those in the bottom fifth. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization and policy institute that conducts research and analysis on a range of government policies and programs. The Congressional Budget Office, Historical Effective Tax Rates, 1979-1997, Preliminary Edition, May 2001. |