🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 18:44:44 -0400, "tonyp" <tonyp@world.std.com>
wrote:

>
>"Brian" <drmorrisnospam@comcast.net> wrote
>
>> How do you figure that?
>>
>> The wealthy don't have more children than the poor and often
>> send them to private schools. That's half of the budget of
>> most communities.
>>
>> The bottom 50% pay 5% of federal income tax.
>>
>> The benefits of Social Security are weighted toward the lower income.
>> Someone earning $80,000 doesn't draw 4 times what someone
>> making $20,000 does even though they pay 4 times as much
>> into the system.
>
>
>"Into the system", Brian says.  That's an important conception:  if you're a
>taxpayer, all the different federal taxes you pay come out of the same
>pocket;  if you're the federal government, all your tax receipts go into the
>same pot.
>
>Now,  Brian trots out the tired old class-warfare talking point that the
>bottom 50% of incomes pay only 5% of all federal _income_ tax, but he
>carefully avoids mentioning two things:
>
>1) What percentage of all _income_ the bottom 50% earn.  After all, if we
>had a dead flat tax structure, and the bottom half of all incomes amounted
>to only 5% of the nation's total income, what fraction of all "income tax"
>would he _expect_ the bottom half to pay?

!3% and they pay 3% of indivudual federal income taxes. The top 1%
earns 19% of income and pays 37% of the taxes.
http://www.kiplinger.com/features/archives/2006/10/income.html

And if you check Wikipedia, "The 2005 economic survey also found that
households in the top two income quintiles, those with an annual
household income exceeding $55,331, had a median of two income earners
while those in the lower quintiles (2nd and middle quintile) had
median of only one income earner per household. Due to high
unemployment among those in the lowest quintile the median number of
income earners for this particular group was determined to be zero"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
>
>2) Bill Gates pays a negligible percentage of his income in FICA.  Not so
>for most people, including Brian I bet.  The fraction of _total_ federal
>taxes paid by the lower half of incomes is therefore not necessarily the
>same as the fraction of "income tax" they pay.
>
>-- TP

And Bill Gates also will draw a negligible amount of Social Security.
I don't see where you refuted what I said about those with lower
income drawing a higher percentage payout relative to what was paid
in. Bill Gates has the same maximum as others. It is irrelevant what
his total income is.

And I haven't yet seen anything to support the claim about the upper
income people not paying taxes to equal what their costs are.