"... 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. (emphases added)
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."
Wouldn't it be refreshing for politicians, particularly on the left, to state the facts rather than trying to mislead Americans by spouting their 'soak-the rich' rhetoric?
6 comments:
The rich are still paying a much smaller percentage of their incomes than they have in the past. Patriotic Americans with the means, should want to help this nation out.
Taxes have never before been lowered in a time of war. Look at the top tax rate in 1945: 94%! Look at the top tax rates of the 1950s, a period that conservatives often hearld our glory days- over 90%!
Is is obscene, and it is horrible policy for the future of this nation to continue borrowing to fund war, and to continue to defer the maintenance of our crumbling domestic infrastructure- An infrastructure build on the sweat and taxes of previous generations.
Again Mr. Usher, you seem to be missing the big picture. The rich simply have to pay more.
And when they do, the economy and the nation will be better for it.
"The Wall Street Journal opines..."
Yes. And the Wall Street Journal also reports:
"In a new sign of increasing inequality in the U.S., the richest 1% of Americans in 2006 garnered the highest share of the nation's adjusted gross income for two decades, and possibly the highest since 1929, according to Internal Revenue Service data.
Meanwhile, the average tax rate of the wealthiest 1% fell to its lowest level in at least 18 years. The group's share of the tax burden has risen, though not as quickly as its share of income."
*****
"...the Bush tax cuts have worked."
Yes. They have "worked" very well for the richest Americans. They have "worked" very well for the Chinese and the Saudi's who own our debt. They have "worked" very well to weaken the economy and the nation.
They have not worked for the vast majority of hard-working Americans and our posterity.
We must change course immediately.
Mr. Bedrosian,
It's obvious you support higher taxes for 'the rich' Do you really mean the 'filthy rich?' You must have some percentage in mind if you believe that. What is it? How progressive should the tax code be? When is progressiveness confiscatory?
If you believe the government should be an even larger wealth transfer agent, then it seems you may be planted more firmly in the socialist camp (this is where Mr. Sanders and Mr. Obama dwell) than in the capitalist camp. Is that the 'course change' you recommend?
The deeper problem is we have a culture of deficit spending and debt that is corrosive and destructive. But we have always borrowed in wartime.
The federal tax code as an instrument of social policy is already progressive enough, thank you.
I don't believe in a "camp" mentality. Socialism and Capitalism are different sides of the same coin. There is no such thing as a "free market." Markets cannot exist without the rules that define them. The governments that create the rules cannot exist without the support of the enterprises they oversee.
I agree that deficits and debt are corrosive and destructive. And I certainly do support senators Sanders and Obama. If you look at facts instead of rhetoric, you will see that the US national debt in the last 30 years went down under Carter, exploded under Reagan & Bush, went down under Clinton and have ballooned again under Bush.
This is not just a coincidence. Supply-side ("Voo-doo") economics are a total myth. The notion that revenues increase as a result of lower taxes is nonsense. It may happen as a matter of coincidence under an expanding economy, but the tax cuts cannot themselves expand the economy enough to make this relationship causal.
It may be true that America has borrowed for previous wars, but what I said was that taxes have never been lowered during previous wars. It is not patriotic to ask our grandchildren to pay for, with interest, the wars we choose today.
Add to that the many billions of dollars wasted on no-bid contracts, waste, fraud and grift in the Iraq endevor and you will realize that govenment does not only transfer wealth from the top down, but also very often from the bottom up.
The Bush tax-cuts are just a syptom of the unprecidented corruption of our current Republican leadership. Corrution that I would call treason. Dick Cheney still collects money from Hallibuton. He is openly profiting from the wars Americans are dying in. And he doesn't even want to pay taxes on it.
The war in Iraq will be the most costly legacy of the Bush years in both American blood and American trasue.
But it's all a big joke to the president.
"I don't believe in a "camp" mentality. Socialism and Capitalism are different sides of the same coin. There is no such thing as a "free market." Markets cannot exist without the rules that define them. The governments that create the rules cannot exist without the support of the enterprises they oversee."
There are such fundamental differences between Socialism and Capitalism and the effects of each that I think they are two different coins. The basic difference is stark and that is who controls the distribution of wealth. For Socialism, the community or state controls. In Capitalism, the person(s) who produced it have the primary say about investments, risk and profits, if any. Today's reality in the U.S. is a hybrid. If that's what you mean by different sides of the same coin, then OK. My concern is that we are moving more to the socialist view and that does not bode well.
However, the idealistic goals of either system are seldom, if ever, achieved in practice. Both systems are based on different views of man and his motivations. Socialism believes that the 'greater good' can be achieved by community/government distribution of resources extracted from individuals (or as some would say by taxation or other means).
I agree there is no truly free market because any market must have rules to be orderly in addition to preventing 'bad actors' from fouling the the water, but overbearing governments who would 'plan' an economy and tax and regulate it unnecessarily stifle individual initiative and creativity. When the rules of the game are so restrictive and costly, risk-taking and investments are thwarted. We have only to look at Europe's move toward a less socialistic approach with the election of Sarkosy, Merkel, and the rising fortunes of the Conservatives in Britain. Old Europe is learning their lessons and the economies of Eastern Europe are rising from the ashes of socialism. (I don't mean Communism)
"I agree that deficits and debt are corrosive and destructive. And I certainly do support senators Sanders and Obama. If you look at facts instead of rhetoric, you will see that the US national debt in the last 30 years went down under Carter, exploded under Reagan & Bush, went down under Clinton and have ballooned again under Bush."
The national debt nor the economy is the result of 'a President.' I believe it's equally a function of a host of factors including Congress, financial markets, technology, wars, etc. The Presidents like to take credit or others place blame there, but that's overly simplistic given the myriad factors involved.
"This is not just a coincidence. Supply-side ("Voo-doo") economics are a total myth. The notion that revenues increase as a result of lower taxes is nonsense. It may happen as a matter of coincidence under an expanding economy, but the tax cuts cannot themselves expand the economy enough to make this relationship causal."
You are wrong in your assessment. There is a causal relationship. It's not coincidental. Do you believe that an expanding or contracting economy is unrelated to tax policy and the confidence it engenders in the marketplace? Of course they are related. One has only to look at Kennedy's tax rate cuts in the 60s and other cuts in the early 20s for evidence, not to mention cuts during the Reagan years.
But supply side or demand side economics do not exist separately in our economy. We have a mixture of both in government and market policies.
"It may be true that America has borrowed for previous wars, but what I said was that taxes have never been lowered during previous wars. It is not patriotic to ask our grandchildren to pay for, with interest, the wars we choose today."
War is an inevitable fact of humanity. We may wish it were not so, but it is. I do agree that war is a serious business and we all should be contributing to the cause. But keep in mind that a goal of the terrorists is to bring our whole system down, including our economy. A balance is required between 'hunkering down' and behaving in a way to keep the economy healthy.
"Add to that the many billions of dollars wasted on no-bid contracts, waste, fraud and grift in the Iraq endevor and you will realize that govenment does not only transfer wealth from the top down, but also very often from the bottom up.
The Bush tax-cuts are just a syptom of the unprecidented corruption of our current Republican leadership. Corrution that I would call treason. Dick Cheney still collects money from Hallibuton. He is openly profiting from the wars Americans are dying in. And he doesn't even want to pay taxes on it.
The war in Iraq will be the most costly legacy of the Bush years in both American blood and American trasue.
But it's all a big joke to the president."
Sorry, but your rhetoric is now overpowering your arguments.
Consider that our fundamental problem in the U.S. is over-spending and, sadly, neither this administration nor this (and prior) Congress has been willing to do much to restrain it. Fraud may well be part of war spending, but it's also part of Medicaid and Medicare spending, too. Some estimates place Medicare fraud as high as $60 billion annually. Deep seated fraud in Medicaid is also rampant. Big spending in any area attracts people who will steal from it.
Because people are sinful by nature and selfish too, no pure idealistic system, capitalist or socialist, will provide utopia. What we need to do is recognize what policies work best in this far-less-than-perfect world.
Taxes are stealing backed by force, and thus are immoral regardless of who they are passed upon.
However, if we are going to talk about taxes and tax cuts. One has to understand that Obama is an idiot.
First off, his plans to increase the taxation on Long Term Capital Gains is going to screw over everyone that has bought a house with the intent on selling it after owning for greater than year regardless if it is their primary residence or not.
There's also the fact that despite his claims to the contrary a massive number of Americans are invested in the stock market, and any attempt to increase Long Term Capital Gains is going to result in investors in corporations voting to reduce dividends issued and thus reduce their tax liabilities. Ironically, the best way to increase the taxes gained from Long Term Capital Gains is to lower taxes so that the larger investors attempt to get dividends increased so they can increase their profits. Not only would the increased yields attract more domestic investment into corporations, but it would also attract more foreign investment, and over a 15 year span (assuming that the tax rate was dropped to 5% from 15%, and yields went from 5% to 10% on dividends and other Capital Gains) then the government would rake in more than under the current system, and drastically more than under Obama's plan.
No, Obama is just a politician that is attempting to divided this nation along economic and ethnic lines instead of attempting to tell people what is best for this nation. Either that, or he's a bloody idiot, because only an idiot could truly believe the garbage he is proposing.
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