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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Joe NYC who wrote (191759)	6/25/2004 9:29:02 PM
From: American Spirit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575817

That's all true. My girlfriend has about 40% taken out of her paycheck up front. She's at about 70 K a year. As a single woman she has no real write-offs so she pays a higher rate than mega-millionaires. She does get some of that refunded later but she pays more percentage wise than I did when I was making 350 K a year. When I was making 350 K I simply incorporated myself, then almost everything I was was a corporate expense including half my home which I used as an office. Like most people I fudged a bit, but in my field I can get away with it becqause almost anything I do can be called "research" including a trip to Tahiti if I like. Plus I hired people and they were write-offs. I paid a lot of taxes dollar wise but about 22% in all. So she paid about 35% and I paid about 22% but I was making five times what she made. Under Bush-Cheney this gap has gotten even worse because if the rich person is a successful investor that's all pretty much tax free, plus the rich person's estate is going to be tax free. That's the biggie, especially if the estate is huge. It creates a permanent idle upper class who give back nothing to society unless they choose to. Meanwhile the overall tax burden under Bush gets shifted discreetly onto the middleclass and they privatize as much as they can making government services like Medicare now subject to corporate profits. So you pay more and get less in most cases.