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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

The real problem is taxes have been the one hit wonder for the GOP


While Republican lawmakers are opposed to tax increases and many Tea Party activists want the tax table rates rolled back, federal taxes are at a historic low.

For the past two years, a family of four earning the median income has paid less in federal income taxes than at any time since at least 1955, according to the Tax Policy Center.

In addition. 45 per cent of Americans don't pay federal income tax at at. A the tax tables came crashing down for top earning Americans after World War 2 from 90 per cent to 35 per cent, the Earned Income tax credit exempted millions of low earners from paying federal income tax.

The right wing also carps about the poor who don't pay income tax, but rarely mention that most of these people live in the low wage states in the South and the West.  

Add in the 4-5 per cent of tax scofflaws who evade paying federal income tax. Many gulf coast fisherman who were not paying income or FICA payroll tax, yet they expected to reimbursement by BP for their fishing losses in the gulf.

The bottom line is that the federal income tax burden has been shifted to the middle calls by the GOP Who promised to reduce taxes but spared that details that their focus on tax relief was for the most affluent Americans.  

All federal, state and local taxes combined are a lower percentage of per-capita income than at any time since the 1960s, according to the Tax Foundation. The highest income-tax bracket is its lowest since 1992.

At 35 percent, it's well below the 50 percent mark of much of the 1980s and the 70 percent bracket of the 1970s.

Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton added:

There's this impression that there's a colossal tax burden and that's not really the case,” But if you're really angry at the government, you're going to think taxes are too high.

If you compare he US taxes as a percentage of GDP, the US is in the bottom one third of developed countries. The real problem is the rich isn't paying their fair share of taxes and the poor aren't paying anything at all.

As Steve Kangas has stated:

Liberals . . .view the runaway profits of the rich (especially in the later stages of wealth accumulation) as undeserved, so redistributing them back to the workers who produced them is necessary to prevent exploitation.

In one of the more famous studies, economists Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini conducted a thorough statistical analysis of historical inequality and growth among modern democracies, and found that t
hose with more equal incomes generally experience faster productive growth. 
 
sources: http://www.ocregister.com/news/-117079-ocprint--.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

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