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Originally posted by Randy
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Originally posted by roneski
OK, time for some perspective. The top 1% of the united states owns more wealth than the entire bottom 95% combined. Say the numbers from your article are accurate. How is it fair that top 1% are only responsible for 1/3 of the tax burden while everyone else picks up the rest?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Lets take a real basic approach though. Even if we assumed your 1% figure was right, you aren't talking about taxing new income - you are advocating retaxing existing wealth with your comments.
In other words, if I own 1 billion dollars, and I've already paid taxes on the 2 billion dollars I earned so I could have 1 billion dollars - are you saying I should pay tax, even if I didn't make any more money?
Randy<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
This points to one of the weaknesses in the statistics the IRS generates. They only report total income and taxes paid on that income, not the wealth of the individuals paying taxes. So, if I say the top 1% of Americans have 75% of the wealth, the IRS does not have statistics to prove me wrong. (Just throwing out numbers...) Plus, one has to look at where on the tax form the 'income' came from - does it include any deductions, capital losses, etc.
Gardiner also indicated out a very interesting point - the IRS documentation only reports on those paying taxes, but the article talks about taxes over the entire population. This means each person who earns no income is counted, so it's inevitable that the results are badly skewed. The article actually pointed this out inadvertantly, when it said "In 2002, the average household's income was $57,852 and it paid $13,529 in taxes."; average income - but this is 23% tax, or top 10%. Oops?
So, in effect, this article really doesn't point out any weaknesses, or even any useful information at all - it just shows tax information with some spin.
Kal.
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