Tuesday, May 29, 2012

Why Taxing The Rich Isn't Enough

The "rich" may have more than you and/or I do, but there aren't enough of them.  You could confiscate every American billionaire's wealth and not put a dent in our national debt.  Heck, I'm fairly sure you could even cover one year's deficit with all that money, and then what would you do next year when the rich didn't have anything to covet anymore?

Yes, covet.  It's class warfare, nothing more and nothing less.  Here is some interesting information about taxing the rich:
We continually hear that "The Rich" got richer thanks to the tax cuts enacted in 2001 George W. Bush's first term. If that’s the case, why is it that in the wake of these lower tax rates (set to expire at the end of this year) the top 1% of income earners now pay roughly 40% of the income taxes collected. As you can see by the chart below from the non-partisan Tax Foundation, that’s double the share they paid back in the early 1980s.

Still convinced the “wealthy” (whatever that means) don’t pay their fair share? It turns out that the U.S. has the most progressive personal income tax rates of any country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). According to the Tax Foundation, “the top 10% of U.S. taxpayers pay a larger share of the income tax burden than do their counterparts in any other industrialized country, including traditionally ‘high-tax’ countries such as France, Italy, and Sweden.” (1) Moreover, the Tax Foundation calculates that even if you took as much as half the annual income “from every person making between one and ten million dollars,” you’d only reduce the federal deficit by 1%.
We don't have a taxation/income problem in this country as much as we have a spending problem.

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