A Stitch in Haste

I always try to pass along these data whenever I see them updated:

The top-earning 25 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $62,068) earned 67.5 percent of the nation's income, but they paid more than four out of every five dollars collected by the federal income tax (86 percent). The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $364,657) earned approximately 21.2 percent of the nation's income (as defined by AGI), yet paid 39.4 percent of all federal income taxes. That means the top 1 percent of tax returns paid about the same amount of federal individual income taxes as the bottom 95 percent of tax returns.

Also:

From other IRS data, we can see that 90.6 million of the tax returns came from people who paid taxes into the Treasury. That leaves 42 million tax returns filed by people with positive AGI who used exemptions, deductions and tax credits to completely wipe out their federal income tax liability.

When you add in those so poor that they need not even file a tax return, and then adjust the returns for family size (the poor tend to have more children), it turns out, as I have noted ad nauseum, that roughly the poorer half of all Americans simply pay no income tax.

Two hasty stitches:

--Remind me again how "the rich don't pay their fair share"? (Or, stated differently, has John Edwards no shame whatsoever?)

--These data are for the federal income tax. The working poor of course do pay taxes: FICA taxes — Social Security and Medicare. So I repeat: Anyone who claims to care about the working poor must, by simple logic applied to irrefutable data, advocate Social Security reform ("soak the rich" is not "reform").


(Click to enlarge.)