Re: UNCIVIL UNIONS

"nicholas a. evans" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.music.dadl.ot
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Mar 9, 2011 8:27 PM, "Karl Swenson" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Isnt it fun that after all the tax cuts, the rich pay more in taxes now
than ever before?

Do you have data from the IRS to back that claim up?  What are you using as
the salary range for "the rich"?  And do you know whether that stat is
referring to the top marginal rate or the effective rate?  Or is it not
referring to rates at all but to absolute value or percentage of the total
tax burden?

For the very rich the top marginal rate is almost inconsequential due to the
many available loopholes.    With income inequality being larger now than
ever before, even a highly regressive tax could still leave "the rich"
paying more than ever before, in both absolute dollar terms or in percentage
of the total tax burden.  That's just simple math, not a nefarious socialist
wealth redistribution scheme.

Here's an interesting and relevant bit of data I just recently stumbled
across: in 2007 the top 400 earners in the USA (each of whom made > $138.8M)
paid an average of 16.6% of their income in taxes (>85% of their income was
from capital gains).  The IRS hasn't released all of the data for 2008-2010
yet.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/07intop400.pdf

I wonder if there's a middle class family in the country with such a low
effective rate.  It turns out we have a regressive tax structure after all.

They've released lots of data up until 2007 and some data even for 2008 and
2009. Perhaps you can find the IRS report that will help us understand in
what relevant sense "the rich" pay more taxes than ever before.

-- 
Nick

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