This link should help.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/1410.html

BTW- that data shows what a myth the issue of a middle class income tax cut is.

If 32% of folks are paying NOTHING, and you decide that you will cut the taxes of the BULK of the tax payers, HOW much money must you take from the so-called RICH??????

Give me a break. The non-tax payers will vote their interests which is to keep themselves as non-taxpayers.

God Bless America. :barf:

Don't you think a big jump on the price of cigarettes will increase theft of same? Cigarettes are already a draw to theives - about as much as a cash register is. On the flip side, this will boost the economy. The black market one.

Where are these people to be found? ZERO Taxes??
I don't think you are referrin' to our state. I don't know anyone making $50K (80% of this country) or $30K or less who doesn't pay property tax, sales tax, fuel tax, cell phone taxes, toll roads, etc.

I really get annoyed when I hear this notion that any working person in this country doesn't contribute to their local and state govts. There isn't a day the middle class and lower class don't dig into their pockets to pay for schools, roads, and state pensions.


I wish we would have seen more tax outrage when we were in the process of doubling our national debt in the span of less than eight years. Financing ten trillion in debt to the tune of hundreds of billion a year on wasted interest doesn't come from pork barrel spending cuts alone. Either cut entitlements or raise taxes.

Below are pallets of $100 bills. Now multiply the pic on the bottom by 5.
That's how much we spent but haven't paid for yet since 2000.


$1 Billion

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/pallet_x_10.jpg

$1 Trillion

http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/pallet_x_10000.jpg


" Don't tax HIM, Don't tax ME, tax that fellow behind the tree..."

^ whoever said that must not have been long U.S. treasuries....

I'd have to agree, when I was single and earning $75K a year, I payed a large percentage of income taxes, with little refunded. Much more than my married co-workers. That link still doesn't give any earnings levels for these non-tax payers. I'd bet they're our large group of poverty level earners.

What I find amusing is that 11 of the top 12 least income paying tax states happen to be overwhelmingly Republican.

10 of the 12 most income tax paying states happen to be Democrat

seems to me like the people most likely to vote for higher taxes are those who are mostly footing the bill to begin with.

Uh... it seems as if 'your' guy is presiding over the single largest deficit in ALL of American history! At least that's how the History Books will record it!

Sure... you can blame it on the last guy... but if you peek beneath the skirt, you'll see a LOT of pork-barrel, ear-marked spending on items which fit a social adjenda and aren't truly relevent to the troubles at hand, and in fact, detract from it.

Increasing Food Stamps (I don't recall seeing any present Food Stamp recipients starving on the streets, or running around with extended bellies - seems increasing Food Stamp subsidies targets a particular voting demographic - ;), of course any resemblance is surely coincidental)... and as several learned economic academics have cited in the last 10 days, the Administration AND the congress ought to be targeting the economy EXCLUSIVELY and not cloud the picture (and expend energies) with partisan, special interest issues and programs - aka Equal Pay for Women, Stem Cell Research, Partisan re-districting, Cigar Taxes, Abortion, and so on. It's about the ECONOMY STUPID!

Get that straight and then go off and satisfy your personal adjenda! Without a strong and growing economy, everything else is for naught!! All IMHO of course...

:cheers:

Well, you have to be careful about the conclusion. For example, here in the Soviet republic of Kalifornia, anti-tax senitment is high. HOWEVER, it is largely high among the income generating folks. We have so many TAKERS here who vote, they overwhealm the tax payers.

That is why we have such an exodus of citizens. The sane ones are fleeing the asylum.

:confused:

Indeed, if you can't see through this budget and stimulus bill, you aren't looking.

Typical progressive view
 

I want a massive stimulus, but hey, I don't want to pay for it!

Hmmm, if not this guy, who?

:D







Hey, Mr. President: Who You Calling Rich?
By Stephen P. Diamond, Jr.
Progressive Blogger/Street Sweeper.com/Attorney

Last week, millions of Americans were surprised to discover that they are rich.

Well, not really.

But under President Obama’s proposed budget, many taxpayers earning more than $200,000 a year ($250,000 for married couples) and less than $500,000 have suddenly found themselves lumped together with the likes of Stephen Schwarzman and Donald Trump, even though they don’t own a private jet, live in a baronial mansion or bring Rod Stewart in to sing for them at their birthday parties.

I applaud the President for ramming through a massive stimulus package to kick start the economy into recovery. But his idea to fund it by raising taxes on the very people who will need to pick up where the stimulus package leaves off, is myopic and dangerously misguided.

Fortune magazine’s Shawn Tully has called these people “HENRYs” –aka “high earners, not rich yet.” They are doctors, lawyers, consultants, managers and small business owners who have prospered in recent years. At first glance, the president’s plan to make the rich pay a bigger share of the nation’s tax bill would seem to make sense.

The only problem is that the HENRYs are not rich.

As Tully explains, “‘Rich’ means personal wealth, or net worth, not income.” Raising taxes on HENRYs at a time when much of the value of their assets–their homes and retirement portfolios–has evaporated, could have unintended negative consequences for the economy and the president’s plan for recovery. Why? Because the HENRYs are big spenders. They are “the bulwark of the professional and entrepreneurial class that drives the economy,” writes Tully.

He’s not kidding. A 2007 HSBC Direct Consumer Survey found that people earning between $50,000 and $100,000 save more regularly than people earning between $200,000 and $250,000 per year, and revealed that 49% of respondents earning at least $250,000 a year failed to save more because they “want some spending money.”

On top of their discretionary purchases, HENRYs carry significant mortgages, pay heavy property taxes, make charitable donations and sock money away for their children’s college education.

Under the president’s plan, beginning in 2011, HENRYs would see their federal income tax rates rise from 33% to 36% and, in the highest tax bracket, from 35% to 39.6%. More importantly, the president’s plan would reduce the amount of mortgage interest and charitable donations that HENRYs could deduct for income tax purposes, from 35% to 28%.

Faced with declining asset values, tough economic times and higher tax bills, HENRYs will very likely rein in discretionary spending this year and next.

That’s bad news for a consumer-driven economy like the United States, which saw consumer spending in the fourth quarter of 2008 plunge to a 26-year low. But reducing mortgage interest deductions makes even less sense when the federal government is trying to reverse or at least stabilize falling housing prices–which, lest we forget, is how we got into this mess in the first place. One of the main incentives for HENRYs to buy a house (or anyone else for that matter) is that they can deduct more than a third of their annual mortgage interest payments from their adjusted gross income. Why buy a house when taxes are climbing and the housing market is tanking if the government is removing your ability to afford the payments?

In fact, the president’s decision to squeeze more taxes from HENRYs is pregnant with potential negative consequences.

Dual income families, in which one spouse’s salary is just below $250,000 and the other’s is significantly less, may decide that the increase in their marginal tax rate negates the benefits of the second salary , when combined with existing high childcare expenses. Many of these families could move to cut their tax liability and expenses by having one parent stop working to raise their children. Childcare companies would see smaller revenues, household spending would decrease and the U.S. labor force would contract even further (both from parents leaving the work force and childcare company lay offs), to name just a few possible ramifications.

If higher income taxes force HENRYs to cut back further charitable organizations, public school systems (many HENRYs send their children to private schools), automakers and other public and private sectors of the economy will pay the price. Such unintended consequences would work to counteract the potential benefits of the economic stimulus package the president signed last month.

I applaud the president for ramming through a massive stimulus package to kick start the economy into recovery. But his idea to fund it by raising taxes on the very people who will need to pick up where the stimulus package leaves off, is myopic and dangerously misguided.

Japan proved during its so-called “Lost Decade” that raising taxes during an economic downturn has a negative effect on consumer spending. “To counter mounting debt created by government stimulus packages,” observed former Secretary of the Treasury (and State) James Baker in Monday’s Financial Times, “Japan increased taxes in 1997. Consumption dropped and the country’s economy collapsed.”

The Japanese experience holds an ominous warning for President Obama.

Make no mistake–high net worth Americans (i.e., the truly rich) can afford and should pay higher taxes. But the president has cast too wide a net in his attempt to capture the big fish. Under his plan he will also trap the smaller ones that need to be let go. His recovery can’t work if he follows his current plan. Unless he wants his economic initiatives to fail, he should let the HENRYs go.

Wisdom from Dr. Sowell
 

Subsidizing Bad Decisions
By Thomas Sowell

Now that the federal government has decided to bail out homeowners in trouble, with mortgage loans up to $729,000, that raises some questions that ought to be asked, but are seldom being asked.

Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand-- for the very good reason that he could not afford it-- why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn't afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway?

Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that they could afford to buy a house, be forced to subsidize other people who could not afford to buy a house, but who went ahead and bought one anyway?

We hear a lot of talk in some quarters about how any one of us could be in the same financial trouble that many homeowners are in if we lost our job or had some other misfortune. The pat phrase is that we are all just a few paydays away from being in the same predicament.

Another way of saying the same thing is that some people live high enough on the hog that any of the common misfortunes of life can ruin them.

Who hasn't been out of work at some time or other, or had an illness or accident that created unexpected expenses? The old and trite notion of "saving for a rainy day" is old and trite precisely because this has been a common experience for a very long time.

What is new is the current notion of indulging people who refused to save for a rainy day or to live within their means. In politics, it is called "compassion"-- which comes in both the standard liberal version and "compassionate conservatism."

The one person toward whom there is no compassion is the taxpayer.

The current political stampede to stop mortgage foreclosures proceeds as if foreclosures are just something that strikes people like a bolt of lightning from the blue-- and as if the people facing foreclosures are the only people that matter.

What if the foreclosures are not stopped?

Will millions of homes just sit empty? Or will new people move into those homes, now selling for lower prices-- prices perhaps more within the means of the new occupants?

The same politicians who have been talking about a need for "affordable housing" for years are now suddenly alarmed that home prices are falling. How can housing become more affordable unless prices fall?

The political meaning of "affordable housing" is housing that is made more affordable by politicians intervening to create government subsidies, rent control or other gimmicks for which politicians can take credit.

Affordable housing produced by market forces provides no benefit to politicians and has no attraction for them.

Study after study, not only here but in other countries, show that the most affordable housing is where there has been the least government interference with the market-- contrary to rhetoric.

When new occupants of foreclosed housing find it more affordable, will the previous occupants all become homeless? Or are they more likely to move into homes or apartments that they can afford? They will of course be sadder-- but perhaps wiser as well.

The old and trite phrase "sadder but wiser" is old and trite for the same reason that "saving for a rainy day" is old and trite. It reflects an all too common human experience.

Even in an era of much-ballyhooed "change," the government cannot eliminate sadness. What it can do is transfer that sadness from those who made risky and unwise decisions to the taxpayers who had nothing to do with their decisions.

Worse, the subsidizing of bad decisions destroys one of the most effective sources of better decisions-- namely, paying the consequences of bad decisions.

In the wake of the housing debacle in California, more people are buying less expensive homes, making bigger down payments, and staying away from "creative" and risky financing. It is amazing how fast people learn when they are not insulated from the consequences of their decisions.

I guess people don't get it.
When you spend 5 Trillion on top of the already 5 Trillion on the national credit card in less than a decade,
YOU HAVE TO PAY IT BACK.
Or you could cut entitlements..........crickets...............crick ets...........

I hear a whole lot of talk of how not to tax that man or tax this man.
But I don't hear any idea of how to pay for the debts we rack up.

You could cease spending every dime on food stamps, bridges, roads, schools, more cops, etc. for every "liberal" (turns out there are more liberals than we realized when the layoffs accelerate) that Obama panders to, and you would still have trillions in debt to pay off and trillions more in entitlement spending to cut.

How are we going to pay for this??

This nation is at a long awaited impasse. Nobody wants to give up their benefits (just the next guy's). Nobody wants to pay more taxes. A third of the country only wants to score partisan points but have no solutions that don't incur more debt (so much for "fiscal conservatives"), the other third are scared out otheir minds that they are going to get layed off and face foreclosure and the other third are too young to understand any of it or are worrying about other things, like how to college without spending the next 20 years paying it back at 15% interest.