🚀 go-pugleaf

acahalan@jupiter.cs.uml.edu (Albert D. Cahalan) writes:

>skg@sadr.com (Keith Graham) writes:

>> For whatever it's worth, the vast majority of the taxes paid in this
>> country are by the top few percentage of wage earners.   We'd hardly
>> notice if the bottom half of the families (ranked by income) stopped
>> paying taxes.

>That is the misconception right there.  While someone poor may not
>pay much, there are many poor people.  There are very few rich people.
>If you could charge the rich 100% it wouldn't make much difference.

No.  The bottom 50% pay less than 2% (I think) of the total taxes in this 
country.  If we were to let them stop paying taxes, everyone else's
tax bill would go up 2% to cover it.  "Poor" people don't pay taxes
on their standard deductions, and then the marginal rate on the small
fraction that's left is much lower than the rate on those of us making
much more money. 

>> The top 10% is paying something like 75% of the taxes
>> in this country, and the top 50% is paying something like 98%.

>Nope.  The top 10% is not rich, maybe the top 1% is rich.
>That of course depends on your definition, but most people
>would put most of the top 10% in the (upper?) middle class.

That's leaves a very large "middle middle class".  But the statement
stays the same; if you noticably lower the marginal rate on the
"upper middle class and the rich", you'll noticably increase
the tax burden on the "middle middle class" (and possibly the poor.)
As I recall, among married couples, the top 10% is around 100k per year,
but that number is pulled from long lost memory, and may be completely
out of date.

Keith Graham
skg@sadr.com