Somethin seems odd.
Taxes on who, and how much. History teaches much about swinging pendulums. Except recently.
Excerpt from recent nytimes article on the budget from President Obama. The bolded section is true and not due to the 1% working harder than the other 99%.
“…That agenda starts with taxes. Over the last three decades, the pretax incomes of the wealthiest households have risen far more than they have for other households, while the tax rates for top earners have fallen more than they have for others, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
As a result, the average post-tax income of the top 1 percent of households has jumped by roughly $1 million since 1979, adjusted for inflation, to $1.4 million. Pay for most families has risen only slightly faster than inflation….”
Another point about the rich getting richer model.. there is no correlation to the rich getting richer and any of them working harder, smarter than those in the middle class. Below is an excerpt from the most recent article about a report done on the 1%ers and everybody else… and by everybody else i really mean everybody else. 1% of 390 million people is 3.9 million people. That’s about half the population of NYC. Or exactly the population of the West Bank and Gaza. Also 3.9 million acres of land in Alaska set aside for drilling…in July just before Sarah Palin was picked to be VP. Serious 3.9 million people make most of the money, but actually pay the least amount in tax… that is actually the hard reality relative to income growth.
What the hell is wrong with people…27.6% nearly a 3rd of all federal tax is paid by 3.9 million people. Not correlating to working or anything just taxing. While 386,100,000 or so paid the other 75% or so in federal taxes. SO what would be fair… take away percentage points from the 1%, reduce their tax and plop it on the 75%, whose income and ability to pay is much less…but whose additional share would be small. How much would you take off– 1% so the top one percentage could pay 1% less and we’d make it up by taking the amount that represented and dividing it up among the 386,100,000 people? Problem is those people have had their healthcare go up by 10% or more every year for almost 10 years…
“…
On average, incomes for the top 1 percent of households rose by $465,700 each, or 42.6 percent after adjusting for inflation. The incomes of the poorest fifth rose by $200, or 1.3 percent, and the middle fifth increased by $2,400 or 4.3 percent.
The share of all federal taxes paid by the top 1 percent grew, but only slightly more than half the rate of their growth in incomes because of the tax rate cuts. The top 1 percent paid 27.6 percent of all federal taxes in 2005, up from 22.9 percent in 2003, while the share paid by the middle fifth of taxpayers declined to 9.3 percent from 10 percent in 2003.
…”
Ok what is wrong with the paragraph above? If you say nothing close your browser. I’m not suggesting there is anything inherently unfair, the 1% of hard working successful people deserve to make more than everyone else…not a question…the problem is the relative differentials. Seems inconsistent that historically this seems more of an anomaly than simply, 1% worked harder and were more successful. Clearly there is a fundamental sense of fairness, common sense that would tell you that say 20% more than everyone else is really good but when difference seems like night and day there is something wrong with the system we all operate under… Capitalism wasn’t intended to do this to an operating society, was it? Here, look at it like this(mostly cause I’m an idiot, forgive me):
- you make 100 dollars
- you pay 31.9% tax on it in 2003 so $31.90 cents
- so you kept $68.10 cents to buy, save or invest (to make more money-presumably tax sheltered)
- you make 142.6 dollars in 2008
- you pay 31.90% tax on in 2009 so $45.49 cents
- so you kept $97.11 cents to buy, save or invest
Anyway, I am not sure what point i wanted to make when i started writing this post… My gut tells me something doesn’t add up. Yes, the 1% pay alot of taxes but relative to the income growth it seems reasonable…and they’re rich. Yes the cost of everything has gone up while the same middle class has not had a over 40% increase in income and yet they pay nearly 20% of all taxes paid. What’s odd to me is that the increases in taxes and potential tax code rewrites would allow most of the rich to take advantage of additional benefits and opportunities to shelter money and lower taxable income in many ways not available to the middle or lower income. Besides that the wealthy tend to ‘live off the interest’ and have been able to get past the hand to mouth stage most of the middle class is trapped in. Not because they are lazy, dumb or not hard working just the burden should be relative, if income is not increasing than tax shouldn’t increase non-relatively…or in other words if the economics screw the middle then we’re all screwed..
Article from ‘04 on bush tax cuts
Article on the CBO report
Article on the Obama Budget
One man’s opinion, I could be completely wrong.