The IRS just released some interesting tax information – the Top 1% of taxpayers is now paying more in taxes than the bottom 95%. Scott Hodge from the Tax Foundation created the chart nearby that graphs the new data.
Perthaps the CD-10 candidates can advise at what higher rate do you tax the “rich” in order to make the tax code even more progressive and supposedly more “fair?”
Once Obama and the Democrats in Congress get done with us, only politicians and public employees will be the rich. Yummm. Who says turnabout isn’t fair play? Hmmm…DeSaulnier is all skin and bones. Blecch. Side of Buchanan please; medium-rare. Pass the BBQ sauce, mate!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h45WnW0ASFY
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Implicit in the 1% taxpayer graph above (but ignored) is how the income equality gap has grown. Are we supposed to feel sorry for those making many millions a year more than they were twenty years ago that they have to send some of their additional booty off to the government?
While most of the top 20% likely earn it, the top 1% are unlikely to have produced anything of value to society. In fact, they are the most likely to have damaged the economy that has ruined so many. Besides, they produced their take off our country’s infrastructure paid for by all. Without the military, roads, canals, dams, airports, seaports, universities, etc. they would have no niche to exploit. We’d all just be farmers praying for rain.
Jeff, that’s such a persuasive argument. Thanks for sharing!
This is the dumbest thing I have ever read, period.
There are two big problems with the trends shown on the graph, first the majority of US citizens will be spending the money of a minority and as a result are unlikely to be interested in any restraint on that spending. Second, the truly wealthy have a great deal of flexibility in when they realize their income and that income is far more sensitive to economic conditions than salaried workers. This leads to states facing a wildly fluctuating funding stream year to year. One only needs to look to Sacramento to see evidence of both these trends.
Thanks, Dave. I think gap also has to do with the fact that a class of speculators led by Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan was able to create super wealth out of nothing but paper and thousands of computerized financial/stock/derivative transactions per second. The gap is troublesome to me not because it exists but because it has created no real worth except in terms of laundering transactions into legal tender and not creating real goods and services that benefit an entire economy and commonwealth. Yet these are the same captains of industry that both Bush and Obama have kept in place to “fix” the bank, finance, housing, and economic collapse. Yet Republicans and Democrats, including local leaders both continue to mistakenly think that we can return to business as usual.
And yet, the rich-poor gap in the U.S. is greater than it has ever been.
Middle-income people wouldn’t care that “Bob” is a billionaire if only Bob had actually earned being a billionaire. If Bob actually produced billions of dollars of goods and services, than everyone would say Bob deserves his billions. However, the billionaires in our country do NOT produce anything. They are parasites who play zero-sum games and pass the risk and consequences onto the rest of society.
If Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the World Wide Web, were a billionaire, we’d all be cheering. That guy deserves to be a billionaire since he did one of the few things you can do to actually create billions of dollars of wealth. He revolutionized world-wide commerce, entertainment, communication, and information gathering by inventing something truly original and unique. Yet, Tim Berners-Lee is not a billionaire.
The rat-bast@rds at Enron, Bank of America, Citigroup, Bears Stern never produced a single drop of wealth, yet they are billionaires. They are billionaires because they control wealth, not produce it. That’s why we say tax the rich. Anyone that wealth is a parasite, plain and simple.
To the Editor:
The top one percent of earners pay 50 percent of California’s state income taxes.
California has the second higest top income-tax bracket in the nation.
California has the highest sales tax rate in the nation.
California has the fifth or sixth highest business income tax rate in the nation.
California, as a high-tax, high-wage, and high service state is assuriung that the next Intel, Apple Computer, Google, or Ebay will be located in some other state or country.
The time has come to eliminate the personal income tax, the sales tax, and the corpoprate income tax in California.
It’s also time to priivatize many state services. When public employees can retire at age 50 and earn $250,000 (or more) a year in pension money, the only conclusion possible is that government is too large and has failed society.
Making California a tax haven, will reduce the unemployment rate from 11.6% — the actual rate is probably 20 percent — to almost nothing.
Richard S. Colman
Orinda, CA
Aug. 3, 2009
A more interesting approach to the question’s subject is what % of the country is owned by the top 1%?