Dreamsglore wrote: Nekochan wrote:Dreams, that attitude presumes that there is only so much money, that there is a limited amount of money and so the government should "help" divide it up.
The middle class is not burdened with most taxes, at least not most federal income taxes. You keep saying that, but it is not true. Where are you getting this? I'd like to see your source on that.
At a Senate Finance Committee hearing in May 2011, Senator Charles Grassley said, “According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government” (meaning that the other 51 percent pay no federal tax whatsoever). At the same hearing, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds asserted, “Poor people don’t pay taxes in this country.” In 2010, Fox Business host Stuart Varney said on Fox and Friends, “Yes, 47 percent of households pay not a single dime in taxes.”[13]
None of these assertions are correct. As the Tax Policy Center’s Howard Gleckman noted regarding a TPC estimate that almost half of Americans owed no federal income tax in 2009, “rarely has a bit of data been so misunderstood, or so misused.” Gleckman wrote:
Let me explain — repeat actually — what [the figure] means: About half of taxpayers paid no federal income tax last year. It does not mean they paid no tax at all. Many shelled out Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes. [….] Some paid property taxes and, it is fair to say, just about all of them paid sales taxes of one kind or another. So to say they pay no taxes is flat wrong.[14]
The reality is that the income tax is one of a number of types of taxes that individuals pay, both over the course of their lifetimes and in a given year, and it makes little sense to treat it as though it were the only tax that matters. Some 82 percent of working households pay more in payroll taxes than in federal income taxes.[15] In fact, low- and moderate-income people pay a much larger share of their incomes in federal payroll taxes than high-income people do: taxpayers in the bottom 20 percent of the income scale paid an average of 8.8 percent of their incomes in payroll taxes in 2007, compared to 1.6 percent of income for those in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (see Figure 2).[16]
At a Senate Finance Committee hearing in May 2011, Senator Charles Grassley said, “According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government” (meaning that the other 51 percent pay no federal tax whatsoever). At the same hearing, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds asserted, “Poor people don’t pay taxes in this country.” In 2010, Fox Business host Stuart Varney said on Fox and Friends, “Yes, 47 percent of households pay not a single dime in taxes.”[13]
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3505
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