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Pastimes : Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (3286)	3/6/2009 6:31:09 PM
From: Oeconomicus	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3816

"Tax cuts were much deeper, and affected far more money, for families in the highest income categories. Households in the top 1 percent of earnings, which had an average income of $1.25 million, saw their effective individual tax rates drop to 19.6 percent in 2004 from 24.2 percent in 2000." You really are ineducable. So is the Times. First off, the effective federal tax rates for households in the top 1% by income dropped from 33% in 2000 to 31.4% in 2004 and another tenth to 31.2% in 2005. The average across all households dropped from 23% to 20.5% and for the bottom three quintiles dropped from 6.4%, 13.0%, and 16.6% to 4.3%, 9.9% and 14.2%. Meanwhile, as I said before, tax burden shares fell for the bottom four quintiles and rose for the top quintile, decile, 5% and 1% of earners. The Times, BTW, is apparently just considering personal income taxes, not all federal taxes. If I gave such a limited view, besides being accused of ignoring the less progressive (or perhaps even regressive) components of the tax structure to give a distorted view, I'd also be able to show in even bigger increase in progressivity than on all federal taxes. Oh, and the Times apparently missed the fact that, on income taxes alone, average effective tax rates for the bottom four quintiles went from -4.6, 1.5, 5.0, and 8.1 in 2000 to -6.5, -1.0, 3.0, and 6.0 in 2005. Effective income tax rates also fell for the groups above that, but in all cases by a smaller percentage. The data is easily found at CBO if you care to be troubled by facts. Hell, I'll make it easy for you - the link is below. I doubt you'll look, though. cbo.gov