If your pay is not yours to keep, then neither is the tax | Aeon Essays. Some radical libertarians hold that all taxation is immoral, on the grounds that it amounts to the state stealing the money of private citizens. This is an extreme position, but the sense that tax involves the government taking ‘our money’ is ubiquitous, and hugely influential in real-world politics.
The former British prime minister David Cameron, for example, repeatedly made a ‘moral case’ for low taxes, based on the need to give back to you, the citizen, more of ‘your money’. And even those who believe in relatively high taxes tend to start from the assumption that one has some kind of moral claim to one’s gross income, a claim that is overridden only by the greater good of equality or the need to fund public services. Outside of academia, almost everyone assumes that the money I get in my pay-packet before the deduction of taxes is, in some morally significant sense, ‘mine’. This assumption, although almost universal, is demonstrably confused. Sign up for Aeon’s Newsletter.
Corporate Tax Avoidance. Tax Havens. Financial Transactions Tax. Land Value Tax. Who Doesn’t Pay Federal Taxes? - Graphic. But What About Other Taxes? While the poorest taxpayers have a negative federal income tax burden, they pay a higher percentage of their income in state, local and other federal taxes. Share of income paid in ... Payroll/other federal taxes Among those who made enough to file a tax return, 35 percent did not have to pay federal income tax because of credits or deductions.
Nearly 80 percent of the households that did not pay federal income taxes earned less than $30,000 in 2011. About two-thirds of people in families earning less than $30,000 voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Paid federal income taxes? Filers not paying income tax And How Do People With Those Incomes Vote? How Much Do Nonpayers Make? The remaining group —people who did not pay federal income or payroll taxes — is mostly elderly. Most of them worked and paid payroll taxes, though. 46% of households did not pay any federal income tax in 2011.
Robert Reich: We Can Save the Economy If We Get Serious About Taxing the Rich. September 23, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. It’s one of the central issues of our time. Reich, who stands a little less than five foot nothing but was named one of the 10 best United States cabinet ministers of the 20th century by Time magazine, says income inequality isn’t just a threat to the economic future of North American society. “Losers in rigged games can become very angry,” he says in the documentary Inequality for All, which will be released in the U.S. on Sept. 27. Reich, who will speak at Vancouver’s Orpheum theatre Oct. 3 at a free event moderated by Anna Maria Tremonti as part of SFU’s 2013 Community Summit, argues in the film that income disparity spiked dramatically in the years before the economic crash of 2007, just as it crashed before the Great Depression.
However, they argue it’s not actually specific reforms that we need to champion. Top tax rate was once 91 per cent. For Economic Stability, Follow the French. (Image: France via Shutterstock)For the past 32 years, Americans have been living a lie. It's a lie that helps out rich people and screws working people, and it's a lie that needs to be called out. The people promoting this lie - most all of them rich people themselves - have been so good at promoting this lie that pretty much everybody believes it.
It's even asserted as fact, without contradiction, in the mainstream media. But it's a lie. The lie is that raising income taxes on rich people and hugely profitable companies hurts economies and even leads to unemployment. The lie that tax increases - like the one the French Constitutional Court just approved - raise unemployment, and that tax cuts reduce unemployment, is widely believed because, like so many Big Lies, it has a small germ of truth at its center. So, you'd think that if you cut the taxes on poor and low-wage people, they'd have more money, which they'd spend, and it would stimulate the economy.
And here's that lie. Tax Flight Is a Myth. Executive Summary Attacks on sorely-needed increases in state tax revenues often include the unproven claim that tax hikes will drive large numbers of households — particularly the most affluent — to other states. The same claim also is used to justify new tax cuts. Compelling evidence shows that this claim is false. The effects of tax increases on migration are, at most, small — so small that states that raise income taxes on the most affluent households can be assured of a substantial net gain in revenue. The basic facts, as this report explains, are as follows: Migration is not common. Thus, while a few affluent households might leave a state because their income taxes are increased, the vast majority stay, and states gain a significant net increase in revenue to help support important services. Against this evidence, anti-tax advocates, policymakers, and journalists continue to rely on a few deeply flawed studies and incomplete anecdotes to back up the taxation-migration myth.
45% of households owe no federal income tax for 2010 - Apr. 17. By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writerApril 18, 2011: 2:35 PM ET NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The fastest way to make the tax-averse incensed is to tell them that nearly half of U.S. households end up owing no federal income tax when all is said and done. But like most statistics, it is often misunderstood -- and, in the case of those trying to stir political outrage, misrepresented. For tax year 2010, roughly 45% of households, or about 69 million, will end up owing nothing in federal income tax, according to estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Some in that group will even end up getting paid money from the federal government.
That does not mean such households end up paying no taxes whatsoever. And the group doesn't necessarily get off scot-free when it comes to payroll taxes -- which support Social Security and Medicare. More than two-thirds -- or 49 million of the 69 million households -- pay payroll tax. How did we get here? The first is temporal. Why the tax-free matter. Soaking the Poor, State by State. US Tax History and International Comparison Study. Analysis of Top Tax Rates Since 1945. Withdrawal of a Congressional Research Report on Tax Rates Raises Questions. The decision, made in late September against the advice of the agency’s economic team leadership, drew almost no notice at the time. Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, cited the study a week and a half after it was withdrawn in a speech on tax policy at the National Press Club.
But it could actually draw new attention to the report, which questions the premise that lowering the top marginal tax rate stimulates economic growth and job creation. “This has hues of a banana republic,” Mr. Schumer said. “They didn’t like a report, and instead of rebutting it, they had them take it down.” Republicans did not say whether they had asked the research service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress, to take the report out of circulation, but they were clear that they protested its tone and findings. Don Stewart, a spokesman for the Senate Republican leader, of Kentucky, said Mr.
Senate Republican aides said they had protested both the tone of the report and its findings. Mr. Historical Top Tax Rate. Optimal Research on Optimal Taxation. After constructing an authoritative database on income shares covering many years and numerous countries, economist Emmanuel Saez, Thomas Piketty, and colleagues have been using these data to plumb important insights on the relationships between growth, policy measures (e.g., taxes, unemployment insurance), and inequality. This paper examines the relationship between income shares at the top of the scale—the richest 1%–and different tax regimes. The paper asks and answers two important questions: 1) do lower marginal tax rates on the rich result in higher income inequality, and 2) do higher taxes on the rich result in lower economic growth?
Answers: yes and no. Panel A in the figure below shows a strong negative correlation between reductions in the top marginal rate and the increase in the share of income held by the top 1% of households. Panel B, on the other hand, shows no correlation between such changes and the growth of GDP per capita. Clearly, these guys aren’t running for office. For Economists Saez and Piketty, the Buffett Rule Is Just a Start. Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have spent the last decade tracking the incomes of the poor, the middle class and the rich in countries across the world. More than anything else, their work shows that the top earners in the United States have taken a bigger and bigger share of overall income over the last three decades, with inequality nearly as acute as it was before . Known in Washington and the economics profession by the of-course-you-know shorthand “Piketty-Saez,” the two have been denounced on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and won mention in White House budget documents.
Mr. Saez, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has won the John Bates Clark Medal, an economic laurel considered second only to the Nobel, as well as a MacArthur Fellowship grant. Both admire, even adore, the United States, they say, for its entrepreneurial drive, innovative spirit and, not least, its academic excellence: the two met while re-searchers in Cambridge, Mass.
But Mr. Net Worth Fighting For – U.S. Income Tax Brackets Over The Past Century. Did the onerous income taxes of the 1950s and ’60s affect the behavior of big-money boxers? The Atlantic’s Henry Fetter believes so, as he explains in his recent article: The 1950s was the era of the 90 percent top marginal tax rate, and by the end of that decade live gate receipts for top championship fights were supplemented by the proceeds from closed circuit telecasts to movie theaters.
A second fight in one tax year would yield very little additional income, hardly worth the risk of losing the title. And so, the three fights between Floyd Patterson and Ingemar Johansson stretched over three years (1959-1961); the two between Patterson and Sonny Liston over two years (1962-1963), as was also true for the two bouts between Liston and Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) (1964-1965). The theory makes perfect sense, and yes, you read that right: back in the ’50s, the marginal rate of the uppermost individual Federal income tax bracket was indeed an incredible 90-percent! U.S. Tax Justice Network. Citizens for Tax Justice. US Uncut | No Cuts Until Corporate Tax Cheats Pay Up! Progressive U.S. tax movement outshines the Tea Party. Gov. Sam Brownback Seeks to End Kansas’ Income Tax. Charlie Riedel/Associated Press Gov. Sam Brownback, flanked by the House speaker, Ray Merrick, and the Senate president, Susan Wagle, at the State of the State address last week.
Steve Hebert for The New York Times Senator Susan Wagle at the Kansas State Capitol. On Wednesday, lawmakers received a bill to inch the state closer to eliminating income taxes, a centerpiece of a broad legislative vision that many in the Republican Party here hope will serve as a model of conservative governance for other states, if not the nation, to follow. While Republican principles of small government and low taxes have holds on large swaths of the country, Kansas provides perhaps the starkest view of the crimson ideology that could challenge Mr. This month, the largest tax cut in Kansas history took effect, and most of its system was handed over to private insurers. In last year’s elections, the state bucked its long tradition of moderate Republicanism. Skeptics, meanwhile, contend that Mr. Republican Governors Push Taxes on Sales, Not Income.
To Reduce Inequality, Tax Wealth — Not Income. Whether you’re in the 99 percent, the 47 percent or the 1 percent, inequality in America may threaten your future. Often decried for moral or social reasons, inequality imperils the economy, too; the International Monetary Fund recently warned that high income inequality could damage a country’s long-term growth. But the real menace for our long-term prosperity is not income inequality — it’s wealth inequality, which distorts access to economic opportunities. Wealth inequality has worsened for two decades and is now at an extreme level. Replacing the income, estate and gift taxes with a progressive wealth tax would do much more to reduce it than any other tax plan being considered in Washington.
When economists try to measure inequality, they typically focus on income, because the data are most readily accessible. But income is not always a good gauge of economic power. Consider a group of people who all have high incomes but differ widely in their wealth. These are stunning changes. Five Tax Fallacies Invented by the 1% We hear these claims often, even though they're entirely false.
An analysis of the facts should make that clear. 1. The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes That's simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700). Here are the details: Internal Revenue Service figures show that the very rich paid 23% of their incomes in federal income taxes in 2006.
So total taxes for the very rich are 29% of their incomes (23% + 2% + 7% - 3%). 2. In 2009, the United States ranked 26th out of 28 OECD countries in total federal, state, and local taxes as a percent of GDP. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "federal taxes on middle-income Americans are near historic lows. " At very high income levels, beginning at about the million dollar range, federal income tax actually becomes regressive. How about corporations? 3. 4. 5. The Ten Most Egregious Tax Loopholes in the U.S. - Page 1 - News - St. Louis - Riverfront Times. A year ago Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, studied the tax returns of 280 corporations. What it found was a Beltway version of a Mafia protection scheme.
From 2008 to 2010 at least 30 Fortune 500 companies — including PepsiCo, Verizon, Wells Fargo and DuPont — paid more for lobbyists than they did in taxes. They collectively spent $476 million sucking up to Congress, buying protection for tax breaks, loopholes and special subsidies. It didn't matter that these same 30 firms brought home a staggering $164 billion in profit during that three-year period. They not only managed to avoid paying taxes. They actually received $10.6 billion in rebates. Guillaume Paumier Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took advantage of a multibillion-dollar tax scam during his company's IPO. Wikimedia Commons Thanks to the luxury-sailing industry, taxpayers helped subsidize Octopus, the $200 million yacht belonging to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.
Kevin W. Related Stories More About 10. 9. Banking: A Crack In The Swiss Vault. If there's anything that the Swiss take more seriously than the precision of their watches or the quality of their chocolate, it's the secrecy of their banks. The subterranean vaults of Geneva and Zurich have served as sanctuaries for the wealth of dictators and despots, mobsters and arms dealers, corrupt officials and tax cheats of all kinds. It's a world U.S. law enforcement has rarely been able to penetrate. So the idea that UBS, one of Switzerland's largest banks, would hand over information on thousands of American tax cheats would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. You'll hear the twisted tale of how it all happened, from a man some people have called one of the most important whistleblowers ever who has been rewarded with a federal prison term and the possibility of endless riches.
Though he was born and raised in the Boston area, Bradley Birkenfeld spent most of the last decade living in Switzerland, helping wealthy Americans hide their money. "And that was how much? " Data Leak Reveals Big Secret Trove of Global Wealth. I.R.S. Awards $104 Million to Bradley Birkenfeld, a Wh.