--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "shempmcgurk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > If elected, both Hillary and Barack say they'll put up the income tax > rates for the rich. > > Yet, according to the statistics at the following site > http://tinyurl.com/3cquum <http://tinyurl.com/3cquum> the rich are, by > ANY objective standard of measurement, already paying far more than > their share. > > Take a look at Table 1 (which, hopefully, I am successful in reproducing > here, below) and look under the column "Group's share of income > tax". The top 1% of taxpayers pay almost 40% of ALL income taxes > collected! The top 10% pay over 70% and the bottom 50% about 3%. > People not familiar with working with numbers and percentages will be impressed by the above, but obviously a percentage of an extremely high number will be much higher than a percentage of a low number.
The key is the percentage. The chart shows the top 1% paying a tax rate of 23% compared to an average tax rate of 12.5%. Actually that's not fair either, as the chart does not take into the highly regressive payroll tax and 4 out of 5 taxpayers now pay more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. So the difference is tax rates paid by the richest 1% (whom obama and clinton intend to raise) is somewhere around 5% higher than average. That isn't much difference. Plus keep in mind that wealth disparity has been increasing rapidly in the US since the middle 1970s, and now the top 1% own about 40% of all wealth in the country, so their share of taxes seems about right. Wealth disparity is a social issue as well. CEOs used to make about 40 times more than the average worker in the 70s but it's close to 400 times more. Wealth disparity is highest in the US compared to all other industrialized countries. Finally there's the issue of the gov't actually paying for what it spends. The federal debt is over $9 trillion and clearly going higher. The 3 republican presidents of Reagan, Bush1 and Bush2 have increased the federal debt by about $6.5 trillion dollars. I'm fine with giving republicans their tax cuts as long as they don't just shift the burden of ultimately paying for them to our children. Of course I remember my discussion with a fairly high reagan appointee in the 80s - I told him my concerns about lowering taxes while increasing spending and the problem of ultimately bankrupting the country. He smiled and replied - bankrupting the govt is not a problem, it's our goal!
