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To: tejek who wrote (3332)	3/10/2009 12:06:50 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 3816

How can you believe this? Because its real. Take a high straight salary at about the cutoff level for federal payroll taxes. You federal income tax rate is 35%. Then add 15.3 percent in payroll taxes, add high state and local taxes (figure New York City to get near the highest), add in all sorts of misc. taxes from the taxes on gasoline, to the taxes on phones, real estate tax, sales taxes, etc.

To: tejek who wrote (3332)	3/10/2009 2:21:10 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 3816

Who Pitches In? Don Boudreaux Here's a letter that I sent recently to the Washington Post: Dear Editor: Supporting Pres. Obama's efforts to "redistribute" incomes, E.J. Dionne quotes an administration official: "'Over the past two or three decades, the top 1 percent of Americans have experienced a dramatic increase from 10 percent to more than 20 percent in the share of national income that's accruing to them,' said Peter Orszag, Obama's budget director. Now, he said, was their time 'to pitch in a bit more'" ("The Re-Redistributor," March 2). This "Progressive" mindset poisons sound thinking. First, in market economies incomes aren't "distributed"; they're produced and earned. Second, persons whose earnings rise disproportionately more than those of other persons generally achieve this outcome by increasing their production disproportionately more than other persons increase theirs; the fact that someone's income rises means that he or she already is pitching in more. Third, the share of federal individual income-tax revenues paid by America's top one-percent of income earners has recently been on the rise. In 2006 (the latest year for which data are available) this tiny group of Americans paid a whopping - and all-time high - 39.9 percent of such taxes.* Sincerely, Donald J. Boudreaux cafehayek.com