At a New America event today, James Glassman (author of the hilariously wrong Dow 36,000) turned his characteristic insightfulness to inequality. "We've done all the redistributing we can do," he helpfully informed the audience. The poorest 50% only pay 3% in federal income taxes!
I was reminded of Glassman's by Mike's excellent comment on the inequality post from earlier today:
The cost of government should be funded in accord with the percentage of assets owned and earned. Here are increases in national debt for the past few years. Note, increasing national debt shows the full extent of deficit spending.
9/29/2006 $574,264,237,491.73
9/30/2005 $553,656,965,393.18
9/30/2004 $595,821,633,586.70
9/30/2003 $554,995,097,146.46
9/30/2002 $420,772,553,397.10
9/30/2001 $133,285,202,313.20
9/30/2000 $17,907,308,271.43
Here are the taxes paid by quintile.
Here is a pie chart of wealth distribution.
As you can see from this chart, the bottom 50% owns 2.6% of the wealth; they are therefore overtaxed because their tax burden is 3.4%. The top 10% own 69.9% and the remainder, the 40% between the top 10 and the bottom 50% own 27.4%. That totals 99.9% of American wealth. Note, the chart is dated 2001. Since then, the upper groups have gained wealth, the lower have lost.
There is a correlation between wealth owned and income earned, but note; there are families with great wealth and low income because the wealth is considered unearned: from stocks, bonds, and other sources aside from the weekly paypacket.
It is clear that the Federal taxes are too low by 575,000,000 in order to meet federal expenses and that the people owning America are drastically undertaxed because they are in no way paying their fair share, which is under 65% when it should be over 70%.
Therefore, all talk of the rich being overtaxed is bunk.
There's also, of course, payroll taxes, sales taxes, user fees, taxes on goods, and all the other regressive charges laid on by the government and helpfully forgotten whenever wingers want to make the point Glassman is. But as to his direct argument, Mike gets it right: We're not even taxing the rich in proportion to the share of the economy they control. Forget taxing them beyond it.
