In article <[email hidden]>,
TBGibb said:Quoted message said:And don't forget to pay your taxes so the rich don't have to!
The money is in the middle class because there are so many of us. The rant
that the "rich don't pay taxes" isn't even good Marxism, it's just envy
(besides, they do pay taxes, otherwise they go to jail). And if we did
confiscate the wealth of "those rich people" the impact on the budget would be
minor compared to a modest tax increase on the middle class.
I PROMISE not to follow up any further posts since this is off topic here,
but as a mathematician I cannot resist putting concrete numbers behind the
claims made here. The following data come from
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?DocID=503&topic2ID=40&topic3ID=41&DocTypeID=1
From my vantage point, I might categorize the "middle class" of US taxpayers
to be those with incomes in the range of 30K - 100K per annum.
(If you're wondering, "middle class" means "those who make between half
and double what I do" :-) ) Call the others "rich" and "poor" for brevity.
This makes 52% of the country poor, 38% middle class, and 10% rich.
Out of every $100 earned by the citizenry, the table seems to imply $21.3
is taken by the federal government in income and payroll taxes. Then
we can tally who got the $100 and who paid the $21.3:
poor middle rich
Earned by: $13.0 $44.8 $43.2 [*]
Fed. taxes paid: $ 1.2 $ 8.9 $11.1
I haven't heard anyone talking about "confiscating the wealth of the rich"
but if the government did it, it would bring in lots of money! They're
keeping $43.2-11.1=$32.1 of the nation's $100 right now, so the feds would
more than double its take this way. (Obviously ignoring secondary effects!)
You wish to compare this to "a modest tax increase on the middle class."
What does that mean? Raising the current net tax rate from 8.9/44.8 = 20%
to, say, 25%? That would bring in an additional (.05)(44.8)=$2.24 for the
feds for every $100 of national income, obviously not even a tenth of
what was suggested in the previous paragraph.
If you want to consider two tax proposals with comparable (short-term)
changes in federal revenue, you might contrast this "modest tax increase
on the middle class" with a 5% addition to the tax rate paid by the rich,
which would net (.05)(43.2)=$2.16. Surely if you believe an increase of
5 percentage points is a "modest" burden for the middle class, you would
call an identical increase in the wealthy's burden to be "modest" as
well, rather than "confiscatory"?
(In fact, one could easily argue that a "fair" change in tax rates would
involve changes by larger numbers of percentage points for the higher
incomes. I'm sure that's what prompted the Bush-era tax cuts, which made
roughly a 2.5-point drop in the tax rates for my ("middle"😉 income range
but a 5+ point drop in rates for the millionaires. These numbers come from
http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/TaxModel/tmdb/TMTemplate.cfm?DocID=458&topic2ID=40&topic3ID=57 )
(Indeed, since those tax cuts were not accompanied by any drop in spending,
they could only be accomplished by borrowing, which means we will pay for
them later. The tax cuts can only be viewed as a temporary "gift" to be
repaid. Over a third of that gift went to the richest 5% of the taxpayers.
To pay back the nation's indebtedness later with a "modest" tax increase
for the middle class without a correspondingly _larger_ tax increase for
the "rich" would indeed mean that the middle class would end up having to
"pay your taxes so the rich don't have to". So, check to make sure the
presidential candidate you prefer has a scheme under which the richest 5%
pay back a third of the necessary future revenue increases.)
We now return you to your bicycling newsgroup.
dave
