Quote:
Originally Posted by dogzilla
I looked up last years taxes. 12.2% federal income tax, 5.4% state income tax, 3.7% local property tax plus 15.3% for Social Security and Medicare gets me to 36.6%. Add in sales tax, gas tax, taxes buried in the costs of goods and services, and I'm within spitting range of 40%. I'm nowhere near the top 1% income group either. Time for the government to stop taking so much.
I read a number of articles that put Wisconsin's budget deficit in the $2 billion range last year. I attribute more of the curent problem to that than I do any tax cut.
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I am not going to go into your specific situation as that would be rather pointless, especially since there would be all sorts of useless debates, such as taxable versus actual income and so on, and this is the internet.
But the tax foundation, hardly a pro tax think tank, estimates the total effective tax rate, by quintile, to be:
12.97% 23.21% 28.25% 31.32% 34.55%
So the richest 20% have on average a total tax rate, combining local, federal and state taxes of 34.55%. So again the 40% in taxes that individuals are supposedly paying is bullshit. And those figures are for 2004, and taxes are actually lower now.
In fact, as a percentage of GDP, total tax receipts at all levels of government were 24.8% in 2009, the lowest they've been since 1959.
Of course, as I said this whole thing is actually irrelevant, as the tax cut that put Wisconsin in the red again was a targeted tax cut and not a linear tax cut that affected everyone.
Ps: Sources:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy11/pdf/hist.pdf
http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/wp1.pdf