Quote:
Originally posted by madp
No. I'm far from rich, and I received a very helpful sum of money from the Bush tax cut. The fact of the matter is that the wealthiest in the nation pay almost all of the taxes. In my opinion, those that paid the most deserve to get the most back in refunds.
Here's a resource which debunks the "tax cut for the rich" rhetoric. You'll have to got to the web page to get the graphs.
http://www.allegromedia.com/sugi/taxes/
<b>Below is an analysis of Congressional Budget Office (CB0) report entitled "Preliminary Estimates of Effective Tax Rates" (07-Sep-1999). The raw numbers can be scrutinized here:
http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index...m=4&sequence=0
All I did was try to make heads or tails of the data by plotting it and extracting the most salient data. The Income Tax Burden is defined simply as who pays U.S. income taxes in the form of individual and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and federal excise taxes. Based on this information, the following conclusions clearly emerge:
An enormous percentage of taxes are payed by a minority of Americans:
The Top 1% of taxpayers pay 29% of all taxes.
The Top 5% of taxpayers pay 50% of all taxes.
Our tax system is not so much progressive as it is confiscatory -- Frederic Bastiat called this phenomenon "legal plunder." A progressive tax is based on the premise that those with more income can afford to pay more taxes, and conversely, those with little or no income should pay no tax. However, a quick look at Graph 1A below shows that the U.S. tax system has become far beyond progressive. Fully half the taxpayers contribute almost nothing in individual income taxes.
The Top 1% of income earners (comprising about 1 million families) earn about 15% of the total income earned by all wage earners in the United States, yet they pay almost 30% of all individual income taxes.
Furthermore, the Top 1% are shouldering a roughly 50% higher proportion of the overall income tax burden than they did in 1977.
The argument most oft used against tax breaks are that they benefit only the wealthy. It is clear from even a cursory look at the numbers below that the 'wealthy' will receive the majority of any income tax reduction because they pay a disproportionately huge percentage of the income taxes! To structure a tax break such that those in upper income brackets are excluded would constitute nothing more than transfer of wealth from those who have it to those who don't (i.e. legal plunder.) </b>
|
Oh man dude you are so right, the rich pay an unfair portion of the taxes. We should cut taxes for the rich... *ding* *brain turns on* I just remembered that the rich control a massive amount of wealth and that is why they are taxed so heavily.
The State of Working America 2002-03
"Like wages and incomes, wealth is a vital component of a family's standard of living. Several key features about American wealth stand out. First, wealth distribution is highly unequal. The wealthiest 1% of all households control about 38% of national wealth, while the bottom 80% of households hold only 17%. The ownership of stocks is particularly unequal. The top 1% of stock owners hold almost half (47.7%) of all stocks, by value, while the bottom 80% own just 4.1% of total stock holdings."
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/bo...2_swa2002intro
__________________
I'm leaving for the University of California: Santa Barbara in 5 hours, give me your best college advice - things I need, good ideas, bad ideas, nooky, ect.
Originally Posted by Norseman on another forum:
"Yeah, the problem with the world is the stupid people are all cocksure of themselves and the intellectuals are full of doubt."
|