Re: Politically Correct Description of the Third World

[Julia Thompson]

On Sat, 27 Jan 2001, Doug Pensinger wrote:

> 
> 
> "John D. Giorgis" wrote:
> 
> > Has anything changed?   Yeah, now the rich are changed confiscatory tax
> > rates of nearly 40% in order to support the poor.  And that's just for
> > starters.......
> > 
> 
> Stupid rich people (of which I'm guessing there are few) pay 40%.  The rest
> hire tax accountants to whittle that percentage down considerably.

When I worked at the IRS, I saw a whole bunch of tax forms.

I noted that in most cases, the maximum paid as *income* taxes was about
1/3 of the total income.

This does not, however, take into account Social Security/Medicare taxes.

And I haven't seen that many tax forms for any tax year since 1994, so I
can't comment on anything more recent than that.

Once we have TurboTax, I can run up a bunch of scenarios to guesstimate
the accuracy of the "40%" statement, if there's enough interest.

        Julia