On May 13, 2011, at 10:40 AM, brad wrote: > How do these numbers disprove that incomes for the middle and bottom > were stagnant or declined?
It doesn't. But the rate changes, unlike what you say, were also significant. > I mean it is a slightly progressive income > tax scale which would cause the bottom end tax receipts to drop more. > So there was both: tax rate changes and economic decline for the > middle. But the tax rate changes helped the upper more than the lower > (there made it less progressive). Did you do the math? The 2007 income tax rate for the bottom 20% was -6.8%; in 1979 it was 0. That's a decline of 6.8 points. For the middle quintile, the decline was 4.2 points. For the top, it was 1.3 points. So the income tax system is more progressive now than it was when Jimmy Carter was in the White House. Social Security taxes have offset that some, but the decline for the bottom and middle quintiles was 4.0 points and 4.3 points respectively, compared with 2.4 for the top quintile. The top 1%, though, have done very nicely, with their overall rate down 7.5 points. The gap between the income tax rate between top and bottom quintile was 15.7 points in 1979, and was 21.2 in 2007. For all federal taxes, it was 19.5 points in 1979 and 21.1 in 2007. The 2007 structure was less progressive, esp at the very high end, than the 1994 structure (right after the Clinton changes), but it's still progressive. Doug _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
