This is no surprise. The tinfoil hat people will have a field day with this information, However, this is mostly true. I could argue bias, however it just feels like a broken record that somebody needs to nudge the needle. Just like miracle Max. I offer to solve your problems with you paying me money.
You people act surprised to see that suddenly the rich are richer! Well they pay less taxes so of course they are richer! This is the whole point behind the tax cuts for the rich!
What did you people think would happen? That the rich would actually start spending because you gave them alittle more money?
This phrase is really starting to annoy me. If you define "the rich" as "everybody who pays taxes", then yes, the recent tax cuts were "tax cuts for the rich". But that definition is obviously ridiculous, so the phrase "tax cuts for the rich" really doesn't apply to the Bush tax cuts. Please learn the definitions of the words you use before you speak again.
The poorest of the poor, the ones who are still paying taxes but just barely, but who are responsible enough not to have children that they can't afford, got exactly no tax cut at all. So did the ones who aren't paying taxes, of course. (And yes, they could have: there have been ideas on the books for giving credits to people who don't earn a living wage.) But you wouldn't count those, because they're not 'important', right?
And, of course, you're still being disingenuous. The recent tax cuts were enormously disproportionately aimed at the wealthiest 5% of the population, and designed really not to benefit anyone else, like those who would actually spend the money and stimulate the economy. (Large increases in spending/purchasing are a much better economic stimulus than large increases in investment with no increases in spending, which is what these tax cuts give us. Ask any rational economist.)
And given that this tax cut is likely to be made permanent, and that we're likely to be hit with a full-on capital gains tax moratorium if Bush is reelected, you will have the amusing experience of seeing large numbers of the richest five percent in the country (the 'idle rich') paying literally no federal income taxes at all, whle the middle class works to support the infrastructure of the country that they enjoy. Reagan tried to do that several times, and I believe Bush Sr. did as well.
Bush's economic team is on record as saying, and I believe this is an exact quote, that they needed to 'shift the tax burden down the income spectrum'. I.e., the rich should pay less in taxes and the middle class pay more. You may agree with this, and that's your perogative, but if you claim it's not happening you're either being blind or you're deliberately trying to make it easier for the administration.
I have an important question about this statistic. Tally the incomes of all the taxpayers in the country. What percent of this total income do the '1% top of taxpayers' make.
Without that knowledge spouting off "the top X% pay Y% of the taxes" is meaningless. If the top X% make 80 % of the money, but pay 39 % of the taxes then they're hideously undertaxed... if the top X% make 10 % of the money, but pay 39 % then they're getting shafted.
The fact that these studies always seem to ignore the issue of
The top 5% of income earners took home more than 22% of total family income in 2001, this very same top 5% of income earners pays nearly 50% of all income taxes. The bottom 60% of income earners taking home more than 31% of the income, this bottom 60% pays less than 10% of the income taxes.
If you ignore the payroll taxes and the social security taxes and so forth, then you get numbers like this. (They aren't right, mind you, they're five years old.) Payroll tax in particular is hideously regressive: you don't pay it at all on capital gains, and you only pay it for the first N dollars of your income per year, I forget how much. But someone who takes home $60k/year pays the same amount in payroll taxes as someone who takes home $60M/year.
And then there are sales taxes... but that's a whole
This issue of who gets the most money from the taxcuts and what not shouldn't be an issue at all.
I'm poor as hell, so I don't have any natural biases(well...maybe). But I do understand that 6-figure+ salary makers pay more than me, and therefore should recieve back more than me.
Did you even bother considering which end of the spectrum actually pays the most taxes, because it isn't the same.
The wealthiest 50% of the U.S. pay 96% of all income taxes. Bet you have never read this before. Despite the fact that this is from 2000, I doubt things have changed significantly since. So shouldn't the people who pay the most, get the most back?
That just proves the original point: that the tax cuts are for the wealthy.
The wealthiest 50% of US citizens pay 96% of all income taxes? I should HOPE so.
The wealthiest 10% of US citizens posess 2/3 of the wealth in the US. (Well, actually, these numbers are out of date... the top 1% now owns between 40 and 50 percent of the US's wealth.) If we extrapolate that down, the wealthiest 50% of US citizens OWN more than 90% of the wealth in the country. Quite possibly more than 96%. (Oops, your own site says that they earn 87% of the income, which, if you extrapolate it out from
"Bush's economic team is on record as saying, and I believe this is an exact quote, that they needed to 'shift the tax burden down the income spectrum'. I.e., the rich should pay less in taxes and the middle class pay more. You may agree with this, and that's your perogative, but if you claim it's not happening you're either being blind or you're deliberately trying to make it easier for the administration."
As my father used to say, "A poor man never gave me a job." Everytime there is a populist surge (in
There are no calls to gouge the rich, even amongst Democrats. The calls are simply to repeal the tax breaks to the rich who won't spend the money and won't stimulate the economy.
Supply-side economics work when the bottleneck to growth is not enough goods and services in the marketplace causing inflation. But we literally have more goods and services in the marketplace than we know what to do with.
Therefore, supply-side policies will inevitably fall flat in the current economy as they have been and wil
What we have here is 'tinkle-down' economics at its finest.
If you want the economy to move forward, piss on the heads of the poor, and give lots of money to the rich.
We have plenty of investment. We don't have plenty of spending. Your point is invalid. Move along.
-fred
PS: You can't imagine how upset I am that the yacht-builders , makers of things that can only be used as rich peoples' toys, had some economic problems.
PS: You can't imagine how upset I am that the yacht-builders , makers of things that can only be used as rich peoples' toys, had some economic problems.
Are you speaking about the Yacht building companies or their middle-class employees who actually built the ships? I'm speaking about those middle-class employees who had their careers destroyed by that *stupid* tax that was only brought about to make George H.W. Bush look weak on economic issues. And that is my point about any talk about "taxing the rich.
I suggest we shift the taxes back UP the spectrum... back to the way it was done when the income tax was first introduced: in 1913, the tax rate was 7% for those making $500,000 or more - 0% for those making less. Adjust that for inflation and call it done!
As I've experienced first hand, the Capital Gains Tax is more of a burden for those of us who don't have much money than those that do. Try "making" any sort of profit out of an investment while fending off brokerage fees and that damn 28% rimjob they call a tax, while you only have a very small amount of money to invest. I realize that it's 28% off of any earnings, but come on, it's unearned.
Take this example:
28% out of 10 million bucks leaves $7,200,000, but comparitively 28% of 10 grand leaves $7,200,
'It's irritating to me, and I'm not rich, so let's get rid of it!'
Well, fair enough. But just remember, we're running huge deficits, and are going to continue to do so for the forseeable future according to the best projections that weren't actually made by someone being paid DIRECTLY by the Bush team.
This money is going to have to come from somewhere, and when you realize that the Bush team wants to shift taxes down the income distribution curve, well, guess who is going to do the paying?
I guess I didn't make my point too well. It's not that they shouldn't tax gains from investments, it's just that they should not evicerate the return on what most people can afford to invest. Sliding scale taxes are my best guess at the best way to go about it, but I think that's getting a little too utopian for rich americans.
Okay, I can see that. If we're progressive about our income tax, I can't imagine why we couldn't be progressive about our capital gains taxes as well.
The truly sad thing is, I didn't even *think* of that before you said it. I mean, god, I'm a liberal, and we have this absolutely dead-flat tax, and the debate has been SO much about getting rid of it or not getting rid of it that it didn't even occur to me to make it progressive.
If you let your enemies frame the debate, you've already lost.
This phrase is really starting to annoy me. If you define "the rich" as "everybody who pays taxes", then yes, the recent tax cuts were "tax cuts for the rich". But that definition is obviously ridiculous, so the phrase "tax cuts for the rich" really doesn't apply to the Bush tax cuts.
First of all, I don't know how everybody involved in these kinds of debates manages to ignore *payroll* taxes, which are just as surely taxes as any other kind of tax, and which fall disproportionately (meaning, a larger fraction of income) on people with the lowest earned incomes. Those taxes have not gone down, although they are in many cases the *majority* of the taxes paid by people with lower incomes. And that's really just the federal taxes. State income taxes, in the states that have them, often have a top bracket at some pathetically low amount; those taxes have not been going down, either.
And then there are sales taxes and gasoline taxes, which end up being a higher marginal rate on lower incomes for reasons that I'm sure should be pretty obvious.
You can agree or disagree with the reasoning behind the Bush tax cuts, but because they were cuts in income taxes primarily for the very highest brackets, there is very little way in which they could not have been tax cuts for the wealthiest.
In a similar vein, the plan to eliminate the estate tax by definition only affects states that are quite a bit larger than the vast majority of estates. By your reasoning, it would be unfair to say that this is a tax cut for the rich because it's a tax cut for the only people paying any estate tax. But those are the rich people. Hence, the point stands.
According to estimates by the Tax Policy Center -- the 2001 tax cut, once fully phased in, will deliver 42 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent of the income distribution. (Roughly speaking, that means families earning more than $330,000 per year.) The 2003 tax cut delivers a somewhat smaller share to the top 1 percent, 29.1 percent, but within that concentrates its benefits on the really, really rich. Families with incomes over $1 million a year -- a mere 0.13 percent of the population -- will receive 17.3 percent of this year's tax cut, more than the total received by the bottom 70 percent of American families. Indeed, the 2003 tax cut has already proved a major boon to some of America's wealthiest people: corporations in which executives or a single family hold a large fraction of stocks are suddenly paying much bigger dividends, which are now taxed at only 15 percent no matter how high the income of their recipient.
okay, let's look at three numbers (i'll borrow two of them from your post)...
- in 2000, the top 1% paid 37.42% of federal income taxes (source [ustreas.gov]) - in 2001, the top 1% received 42% of the tax cuts - in 2003, the top 1% received 29.1% of the tax cuts
so, in 2001 the top 1% did recieve 4.58% more than their share of the tax cut, but the bottom 99% received 8.32% more than their share in 2003. i can't comment on the top 0.13% because i don't know how much they pay. my point is that the tax cuts are roughly prop
dividends, which are now taxed at only 15 percent no matter how high the income of their recipient
You're conveniently overlooking that in the USA, corporate profits of ordinary corporations are taxed twice, once as corporation income tax, and once as income of the recipient. So if the corporation is making serious profits and paying (say) 40% tax, the effective tax rate to stockholders is 40 + (15% * 60) = 49%. Not 15%.
The only way to avoid this is by forming a "subchapter S corporation", (small privatel
Okay, let's phrase it correctly:
"Tax cuts for everybody that pays taxes and portioned in such as manner as to allow the rich to send all 15 childen (if they have 15 children) to Harvard for 6 years each... and people with lower middle class incomes to say 'Golly, gee batman! I can add this to next year's taxcut and might be able to afford a PS2!!'"
Oh, wait a second, I forgot we were speaking colloquially. Yes, "tax cuts for the rich" should suffice.
If you want to know who "the rich" are, try surfing through here:
http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/index.html
You will find that the oft-touted "top one percent" begins at $292,913. You will also find that the "top ten percent" begins at $92,754.
If you make more than $92,754, and many people on/. do, congratulations, you are one of "the rich" at least as far as the IRS, the vast majority of social scientists and most of the general public see it.
Yes, of the 130 Million personal returns received by the IRS in
Here we go. (Score:1)
Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:0, Flamebait)
You people act surprised to see that suddenly the rich are richer! Well they pay less taxes so of course they are richer! This is the whole point behind the tax cuts for the rich!
What did you people think would happen? That the rich would actually start spending because you gave them alittle more money?
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:3, Informative)
This phrase is really starting to annoy me. If you define "the rich" as "everybody who pays taxes", then yes, the recent tax cuts were "tax cuts for the rich". But that definition is obviously ridiculous, so the phrase "tax cuts for the rich" really doesn't apply to the Bush tax cuts. Please learn the definitions of the words you use before you speak again.
Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:5, Interesting)
And, of course, you're still being disingenuous. The recent tax cuts were enormously disproportionately aimed at the wealthiest 5% of the population, and designed really not to benefit anyone else, like those who would actually spend the money and stimulate the economy. (Large increases in spending/purchasing are a much better economic stimulus than large increases in investment with no increases in spending, which is what these tax cuts give us. Ask any rational economist.)
And given that this tax cut is likely to be made permanent, and that we're likely to be hit with a full-on capital gains tax moratorium if Bush is reelected, you will have the amusing experience of seeing large numbers of the richest five percent in the country (the 'idle rich') paying literally no federal income taxes at all, whle the middle class works to support the infrastructure of the country that they enjoy. Reagan tried to do that several times, and I believe Bush Sr. did as well.
Bush's economic team is on record as saying, and I believe this is an exact quote, that they needed to 'shift the tax burden down the income spectrum'. I.e., the rich should pay less in taxes and the middle class pay more. You may agree with this, and that's your perogative, but if you claim it's not happening you're either being blind or you're deliberately trying to make it easier for the administration.
Either way, pretty sad.
-fred
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:2, Insightful)
Without that knowledge spouting off "the top X% pay Y% of the taxes" is meaningless. If the top X% make 80 % of the money, but pay 39 % of the taxes then they're hideously undertaxed... if the top X% make 10 % of the money, but pay 39 % then they're getting shafted.
The fact that these studies always seem to ignore the issue of
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:2)
Greeeeat numbers (Score:2)
And then there are sales taxes... but that's a whole
Get your numbers straight (Score:1)
I'm poor as hell, so I don't have any natural biases(well...maybe). But I do understand that 6-figure+ salary makers pay more than me, and therefore should recieve back more than me.
Did you even bother considering which end of the spectrum actually pays the most taxes, because it isn't the same.
The wealthiest 50% of the U.S. pay 96% of all income taxes. Bet you have never read this before [bartcopnation.com]. Despite the fact th
Re:Get your numbers straight (Score:1)
That just proves the original point: that the tax cuts are for the wealthy.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
You say that like I should be impressed (Score:2)
The wealthiest 10% of US citizens posess 2/3 of the wealth in the US. (Well, actually, these numbers are out of date... the top 1% now owns between 40 and 50 percent of the US's wealth.) If we extrapolate that down, the wealthiest 50% of US citizens OWN more than 90% of the wealth in the country. Quite possibly more than 96%. (Oops, your own site says that they earn 87% of the income, which, if you extrapolate it out from
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:2)
As my father used to say, "A poor man never gave me a job." Everytime there is a populist surge (in
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:1)
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:2)
If you want the economy to move forward, piss on the heads of the poor, and give lots of money to the rich.
We have plenty of investment. We don't have plenty of spending. Your point is invalid. Move along.
-fred
PS: You can't imagine how upset I am that the yacht-builders , makers of things that can only be used as rich peoples' toys, had some economic problems.
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:2)
Are you speaking about the Yacht building companies or their middle-class employees who actually built the ships? I'm speaking about those middle-class employees who had their careers destroyed by that *stupid* tax that was only brought about to make George H.W. Bush look weak on economic issues. And that is my point about any talk about "taxing the rich.
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:1)
Re:Not even true in the way YOU mean it (Score:1)
Take this example:
28% out of 10 million bucks leaves $7,200,000, but comparitively 28% of 10 grand leaves $7,200,
Great argument (Score:2)
Well, fair enough. But just remember, we're running huge deficits, and are going to continue to do so for the forseeable future according to the best projections that weren't actually made by someone being paid DIRECTLY by the Bush team.
This money is going to have to come from somewhere, and when you realize that the Bush team wants to shift taxes down the income distribution curve, well, guess who is going to do the paying?
Hint: it won't
Re:Great argument (Score:1)
Weeelll... maybe... (Score:2)
The truly sad thing is, I didn't even *think* of that before you said it. I mean, god, I'm a liberal, and we have this absolutely dead-flat tax, and the debate has been SO much about getting rid of it or not getting rid of it that it didn't even occur to me to make it progressive.
If you let your enemies frame the debate, you've already lost.
-fred
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, I don't know how everybody involved in these kinds of debates manages to ignore *payroll* taxes, which are just as surely taxes as any other kind of tax, and which fall disproportionately (meaning, a larger fraction of income) on people with the lowest earned incomes. Those taxes have not gone down, although they are in many cases the *majority* of the taxes paid by people with lower incomes. And that's really just the federal taxes. State income taxes, in the states that have them, often have a top bracket at some pathetically low amount; those taxes have not been going down, either.
And then there are sales taxes and gasoline taxes, which end up being a higher marginal rate on lower incomes for reasons that I'm sure should be pretty obvious.
You can agree or disagree with the reasoning behind the Bush tax cuts, but because they were cuts in income taxes primarily for the very highest brackets, there is very little way in which they could not have been tax cuts for the wealthiest.
In a similar vein, the plan to eliminate the estate tax by definition only affects states that are quite a bit larger than the vast majority of estates. By your reasoning, it would be unfair to say that this is a tax cut for the rich because it's a tax cut for the only people paying any estate tax. But those are the rich people. Hence, the point stands.
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:1)
I do know that he gave those with kids a break on taxes but most of it went to the wealthy. Check your facts before you speak again!
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:4, Interesting)
According to estimates by the Tax Policy Center -- the 2001 tax cut, once fully phased in, will deliver 42 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent of the income distribution. (Roughly speaking, that means families earning more than $330,000 per year.) The 2003 tax cut delivers a somewhat smaller share to the top 1 percent, 29.1 percent, but within that concentrates its benefits on the really, really rich. Families with incomes over $1 million a year -- a mere 0.13 percent of the population -- will receive 17.3 percent of this year's tax cut, more than the total received by the bottom 70 percent of American families. Indeed, the 2003 tax cut has already proved a major boon to some of America's wealthiest people: corporations in which executives or a single family hold a large fraction of stocks are suddenly paying much bigger dividends, which are now taxed at only 15 percent no matter how high the income of their recipient.
Sounds like TAX CUTS FOR THE RICH to me!!!
let's look at the numbers (Score:1)
- in 2000, the top 1% paid 37.42% of federal income taxes ( source [ustreas.gov])
- in 2001, the top 1% received 42% of the tax cuts
- in 2003, the top 1% received 29.1% of the tax cuts
so, in 2001 the top 1% did recieve 4.58% more than their share of the tax cut, but the bottom 99% received 8.32% more than their share in 2003. i can't comment on the top 0.13% because i don't know how much they pay. my point is that the tax cuts are roughly prop
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:2)
You're conveniently overlooking that in the USA, corporate profits of ordinary corporations are taxed twice, once as corporation income tax, and once as income of the recipient. So if the corporation is making serious profits and paying (say) 40% tax, the effective tax rate to stockholders is 40 + (15% * 60) = 49%. Not 15%.
The only way to avoid this is by forming a "subchapter S corporation", (small privatel
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:1)
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/index.html
You will find that the oft-touted "top one percent" begins at $292,913. You will also find that the "top ten percent" begins at $92,754.
If you make more than $92,754, and many people on
Yes, of the 130 Million personal returns received by the IRS in
Re:Why do you think Bush gave them tax cuts? (Score:1)