WP: Tax Burden Shifts to the Middle

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61178-2004Aug12?language=printer

Since 2001, President Bush's tax cuts have shifted federal tax payments from the richest Americans to a wide swath of middle-class families, the Congressional Budget Office has found, a conclusion likely to roil the presidential election campaign.

The CBO study, due to be released today, found that the wealthiest 20 percent, whose incomes averaged $182,700 in 2001, saw their share of federal taxes drop from 64.4 percent of total tax payments in 2001 to 63.5 percent this year. The top 1 percent, earning $1.1 million, saw their share fall to 20.1 percent of the total, from 22.2 percent.

Over that same period, taxpayers with incomes from around $51,500 to around $75,600 saw their share of federal tax payments increase. Households earning around $75,600 saw their tax burden jump the most, from 18.7 percent of all taxes to 19.5 percent.

The analysis, requested in May by congressional Democrats, echoes similar studies by think tanks and Democratic activist groups. But the conclusions have heightened significance because of their source, a nonpartisan government agency headed by a former senior economist from the Bush White House, Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Indeed, the study will likely stoke an already burning debate about the fairness and efficacy of $1.7 trillion in tax cuts that the president pushed through Congress.

The rich pay the most in taxes so they should get the biggest tax cut.


The rich creat jobs so it is better to give them tax cuts rather than the middle class.

Freepers buy this BS even while they can't make ends meet.

and that increased taxes, the thing they have held as their mantra for years, don't bother them at all. They just don't pay.

...shafted America to give more of his friends OUR MONEY. I'm SHOCKED!

they still have a ways to go before we can say they have BALLS.

from the middle class at all.

Don't you get it? Some people will vote for this cheneyer simply because, "hey, at least he won't let them faggots get married, and he believes in Gawd!" Jeesh! 35 percent of the Murikan people would vote for this guy if he ate babies on CNNAZI.

Like Napolean said: "Religion is what keeps the poor from killing the rich".

"In fact they are still paying too much." It will be suitably sugared, but that will be the essence of it. Lots of people will buy it too.

And we can just reply, "those tax cuts for the upper %1 sure resulted in a shit load of new jobs".

"The burden of a tax is measured not in how much was taken, but how little you have left."

If you were the richest man in America before taxes, and you're the richest man in America after taxes, who gives a damn how much you had to pay? You have the least right of anyone in the system to complain.

And if I understand correctly, our current tax system is scaled by bracket, which is to say that everyone pays the same taxes on the same block of money (i.e. higher tax brackets only pay higher percentages of the money that put them into the higher bracket). Hence, it can flatten the distance between the richest and poorest, but it's never going to tax the rich into the poor (or middle class).

go to fed reserve site, flow of funds section, table L-5, bottom line. Liabilities, 78 T, tho that can be cancelled.

Total GDP, about 10 Trillion. Any breakdown into income, folks?

ike's top tax rate, 90% in '52.

A time of prosperity.

Except for the 70's, these rates were applied to ordinary income. Unearned income (dividends and capital gains) are now taxed at far, far less. (It's the GOP's "fuck labor" attitude.)

Kerry should not let Bush frame this fact.

I know Kerry is supposed to be on an ad blackout, but if he waits three weeks, people will already have heard Bush's side so many times that it won't matter what Kerry says.

This is the perfect time to go on the offensive - we can beat Bush on this issue alone if Kerry is willing to take the initiative and frame it for the American people right away.

Don't wait for Bush to strike first!

We need to be on the offensive, not the defensive on this.

"Suckers for Tax Cut Tricks" membership hits all-time high.

It's unheard of.

the heaviest tax burden.

WASHINGTON – One-third of President Bush's tax cuts in the past three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published today.

The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings – about $57,000 a year – were getting an average cut of only $1,090.

The new estimates confirm what independent tax analysts have long said: that Bush's tax cuts have been heavily skewed to the very wealthiest taxpayers, though those are also the people who pay a disproportionate share of federal income taxes.


Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040813/news_1n13nation.html

This is one of the most important issues in this election and one of the least covered. George is wagging the dog with this war while pulling the wool over everyones eyes tax wise. The problem is discussion of economics and taxes make everyones eyes glaze over. We have to find a way to get the massage out to the general public in away that is convincing and understandable before the right spinmiesters steal the message and convince them that they are better of when they are not. I have attempted to do this in an article on my site http://www.liberalsbiteback.com entitled "A beginners guide to how the rich right is trying to become permanently mega rich and the rest of us permanently screwed"

How the percent of wealth controlled by the top 20% and top 1% compares to their shares of taxes as reported above?

According to http://faireconomy.org/research/wealth_charts.html, in 2001 the wealthiest 1% controlled 32.7% of the wealth, while the richest 10% (not 20%) owned 69.8% of the nation's wealth. So clearly federal taxes on the rich are a disproportionately small fraction of their wealth. It might look somewhat different if you look at income but the notion that the rich are shouldering an unfair burden is laughable.

We just need to add a 3% flat tax on accumulated wealth. According to your graph, it will generate $1.26 trillion in taxes and it will be the richest 10% of the people who pay 69.8% of the new tax. Actually, with certain exemptions like the first X in general savings and the first Y in retirement savings not being taxable it works out to be a great tax scheme. It encourages the rich to start spending their money--things may actually start trickling down like the Repubs always say it will.

Peruse this site for some answers: http://www.inequality.org/factsfr.html

Oops. Didn't notice your "got your answers" post until after posting this. Your site appears to have more current numbers than mine, too.

Yes, the notion that the wealthiest segment (who overwhelmingly benefit from our "social contract") pays a disproportionate burden in taxes is highly laughable. It always has been a laugh, but has gotten worse since the ascendency of the rabid right starting with Ron Raygun.

I recall a chart from Michael Harrington's Twilight of Capitalism in the seventies that showed, even then when we had a relatively "progressive" income tax, that essentially the nation paid a "flat tax" with a slight blip in tax burden for the very poor and the very rich (I'm talking about the aggregate of all taxes, of course). My horror about Reagan's tax cuts, starting with the TRA of 1981 (and worsened by the ERTA of 1986) was that I thought it would shift income up the socioeconomic strata, and of course it did. This redistribution of wealth and reward upward continued with GHWB, slowed a bit under Clinton, and has been accelerated by GWB.

We live in a LOOTOCRACY, folks. Watch your wallets as the robber barons come next for your social security, wrapped tightly in red-white-and-blue!

although we already knew this.....

When the rich pay NO income tax, then we'll have a real plutocracy. O happy day!

Everyone should be forced to read Perfectly Legal by David Kay Johnston, the NYT Tax reporter. Like this article says, we pretty much have the flat tax Steve Forbes and the Republicans wanted. The top 1 percent pay pretty much the percentage of their income in taxes as my wife and I do.

Not only is our tax system flat, it has redistributed wealth upward. The fact that workers paid money in advance into the Social Security trust find and now that money is being used to give back money to the richest 1% and big corporations while their is talk of reducing benefits is an outrage.

The fact that this is old news and so many of the people getting screwed by these policies don't care is depressing.

. . . .

Never has so much been given to so few for so little work. The Waltons -- the five heirs to Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, each got an estimated $38,000,000 in tax cuts. The average family, according to Bush, got a cut of $1,500. It’s a bit of a difference, isn’t it? If these estimates are correct, each Walton gets 25,000 (25 THOUSAND) times what the average family gets.

How much does Bush value the Waltons and their clout? He seems to think each one of them deserves to get and spend as much tax relief as 25 THOUSAND ordinary families put together.

How do you get a bunch of guys to shut up and look the other way while some other guy gets a handout of $25,000? Well, it’s easy. You slip a dollar bill into the hands of each of the onlookers, have a few of them jump up and down about it for joy, and while they are in a state of ecstasy over the buck they just got, you quietly, softly, discreetly ask the lucky guy who got the $25,000 to give you back $2,000 as a donation. Isn’t that how Bush has raised his record campaign contributions for 2004?

Suskind, The Price of Loyalty, 299, 302; “Cheney Visit to Wal-Mart Shows He’ll Never ‘Get It’; VP Lauds Tax Cuts in Backyard of Biggest Beneficiaries of Dividend Tax Slash,” The Food and Allied Service Trades Department of the AFL-CIO, May 5, 2004, http://www.fastaflllcio.org (estimates of amounts of Walton tax cuts); see also, Alterman and Green, The Book on Bush, 36-60; Huberman, The Bush-Hater’s Handbook, 22, 27-28 (“The ‘Leave no Millionaire Behind Act’”); Carville, HAD ENOUGH?, 124-125; Donor Detail for John Walton, Bentonville, Ar, ($2000 on November 13, 2003), Alice Walton, Bentonville, Ar ($2000 on February 23, 2004), Jim Walton, Bentonville, Ar ($2000 November 13, 2003), GeorgeWBush.com, http://www.georgebush.com/Donors/donordetail.aspx?id=20798149 (John), . . . 21565600 (Alice), . . . 20705937 (Jim); “Bush's super fundraisers join the queue for favours,” Mail & Guardian online.

:grr:

My family saw the biggest increase in tax burden so to Bushco I say

I apologize in advance for the emoticon.

A Tax Increase. I hope some of our spokesman start talking about how Bush raised taxes.

especially with the little voice-over of Bush
saying the rich find ways to not pay taxes....

the entire US Treasury in the direction of his cronies. if the military-industrial complex and energy companies weren't taking all of our tax money and shoveling it into their coffers, we wouldn't have such an enormous deficit building up which will require us to pay in staggering amounts and never see anything get any better inside our own country's borders, while we watch everything get worse around us instead (approaching a police state) and things becoming downright horrible in other countries. THEY ARE TAKING OUR MONEY AT RECORD RATES AND USING IT AS A WEAPON AGAINST US.

www.costofwar.com

Your kids have no health insurance, gramma cant buy her medicine because her rent is due, and dad is in Iraq, so your house is being foreclosed on...and mom is living on the street with her kids because the only job she has is at Wal Mart making 5 bucks an hour..they closed the womens shelters because the state cant afford them....
thats Bushworld.

issues are important-Bush is burning down the country but some people don't get it-it is a mystery to me:shrug: