MSNBC: Americans Just Don’t Pay Enough Taxes

MSNBC: Americans Just Don’t Pay Enough Taxes – Period! By Noel Sheppard Created 11/26/2011 - 1:23pm

If you had the misfortune of watching Weekends with Alex Witt on MSNBC Saturday morning, you sadly were treated to four minutes of propaganda about how we Americans just don’t pay enough taxes – period!

CQ Roll Call’s David Hawkings was invited on to misinform the gullible about Americans’ tax rates being too low, corporations shirking their tax responsibilities, the poor paying more than conservatives contend, and, of course, the rich not paying their “fair share” (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):

“If you take all the taxes paid in the United States and you compared them against other countries, the U.S. overall taxes are the lowest as a percentage of the economy among developing countries,” said Hawkings. “About one out of every four dollars in the whole economy is paid in taxes. That’s lower than any other country in the developed world. In Denmark it’s as high as about 50 percent.”

I realize this might seem like an odd question, but what is the goal of a capitalist system? Is it for the citizens to pay the highest taxes possible or for them to build their own wealth?

If the goal is the former, I’d suggest even Denmark is failing: why stop at 50 percent?

But here in America, which was founded by former British citizens escaping the King’s confiscatory taxes, we have historically strived for the tax burden to be as low as possible, even as low as zero during peacetime.

Yet Hawkings seemed a bit confused about our tax history saying, “If you compare the U.S. taxes now to where they have been historically, lower than almost any year in recent memory. The income tax has been around for about a hundred years. For about half that time the tax rate has been higher than it is now for the top earners.”

Well, that means that half of those roughly 100 years, the tax rate for top earners has been lower. Now add the 100-plus years prior to that and taxes on the most successful are now actually higher than they’ve historically been.

When the subject of what America’s poor pay in taxes surfaced, Hawkings said, “Conservatives point out that in fact as many as half of Americans in the last year paid no income taxes, no traditional IRS income taxes. But let’s remember that nine percent were unemployed, some are elderly and disabled, and almost all the rest of them pay those payroll tax deductions that we see in our paychecks that come out for Medicare and Social Security.”

Yes, but according to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2006, the bottom quintile in the nation paid just 0.8 percent of all federal taxes collected including income, payroll, excise, and corporate.

By contrast: the richest 20 percent paid 69.3 percent; the richest ten percent paid 55.4 percent; the richest 5 percent paid 44.7 percent, and; the richest one percent paid 28.3 percent.

Maybe more importantly, as can be plainly seen from the following CBO chart, what the poor have been paying has been declining since 1979 while what the upper-earners have contributed has steadily risen:

But what did surface, of course, was the fiction that the rich just aren’t paying their “fair share.”

“Historically, the top one percent of Americans pay a big chunk of the taxes,” said Hawkings. “Conservatives say in fact they pay about a quarter of the taxes, but they make 40 percent of the money. That much is true, but again, like we were talking about a minute ago with the corporations, the rich have an enormous advantage in terms of their deductions. They can deduct their capital gains taxes, they can deduct charitable donations. They have a better job with their accountants and in some cases their own lobbyists keeping their tax rate low.”

Maybe so, but what Hawkings dishonestly ignored is that with all that, the rich still pay more as a percent of both taxable and adjusted gross income than lower wage earners.

The IRS tables for 2009 show folks making $200,000 or more paid between 26.3 and 28.6 percent of their taxable incomes. By contrast, those making less than $200,000 paid between 17.8 and 22.1 percent.

As such, the progressive nature of our tax code – meaning folks that make more pay more – is still quite intact in America despite the carping and whining of liberals about the rich not paying their “fair share.”

If only it were required that actual real tax percentages reported by CBO and the IRS be included in such discussions.

It would make it much more difficult for the Left to continually propagandize the nation about who is and who isn’t paying taxes.

Obviously whomever is conducting the audit isn’t accurately accounting all taxation.

States such as NY and CA typically have about a 50cent/gallon set of taxes on gasoline.

So for every mile traveled, that’s about 2-5cents per mile taxed for vehicle travel.

That tax hits every hard commodity sold in those states just for delivery charges.

Now add the 8.5 percent sales tax and the lowest income workers are nearly always paying a minimum of 10% tax just to survive with any income.

The larger curse are the number of regulatory requirements for all aspects of commerce, which drive unnecessary costs when not required except by regulatory fiat.

As a rule of thumb we pay roughly 10x the raw cost for any product and service.

That is why the economy is failing.

The rest of society has just been corrupted by those metrics as business as usual. Any efficiencies gleaned are simply regulated and taxed again, not only removing profits, but reducing incentive to even work.

As Rush pointed out last summer in the wake of the United States Downgrade, the rich aren't rich enough to solve the problem. That is, assuming they'd bother to stay rich if all their income was confiscated. Actually, they'd opt to be poor, and God help all the little people to whom they gave jobs!

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2011/08/05/there_aren_t_enough_rich_to_tax

Right now it looks like we're in a race to see whether the country or Obama will tank first. It looks like it's running neck and neck here. And the trick here is to make Obama tank first. Now, this UK Daily Mail story that you will not see in the US media. "Soak the rich, eh? They do not have the money. A report from the Internal Revenue Service found that the rich --" and the rich are defined this way: 8,274 people with incomes of $10 million per year or more. What do you think those 8,274 people earned combined in 2009? Snerdley, take a wild guess. All of you out there, take a wild guess in your mind. I'm not asking you to call and I'm gonna tell you what the number is here in just a second. But just think about this, 8,274 people with incomes of $10 million per year or more.
Now, you got Buffett in there and Gates at their $40 to 50 billion, but that's their net worth. What do they earn? It's a different number. But you take all of those people, just give me a number, what do you think, 8,274 people with incomes of $10 million per year or more, what was the combined total income earned of all those 8,274 people in 2009? One trillion, $250 billion. That's what you say, Brian? Snerdley says a trillion. The answer is $240 billion. Brian, you were $10 billion off. That's it. That's right. That's it. The 8,274 people with incomes of $10 million per year or more earned a total of $240 billion in 2009.
"Even of you confiscated every dime they earned, you would barely have enough money to cover government spending for 24 days." In fact, this $240 billion, I mean that's pretty close to the actual real number of budget cuts in the debt deal when you strip everything away. Now, about 25% of that money already goes to the federal government for federal income. So actually that $240 billion would run the government for 18 days.
"Another 227,000 people earned $1 million or more in 2009. Millionaires averaged taxes of 24.4% of their income -- up from 23.1% in 2008." Now, you might be asking, how did that happen? Well, the Bush tax cuts, folks. Obama's tax increases hadn't started, and Obama's not immaculated yet. "They, too, did not earn enough money to come anywhere close to covering the annual deficits that are $1.5 trillion a year." So 8,274 people who earn $10 million per year or more, earn a total of $240 billion in 2009. Another 227,000 people earned a million dollars or more in 2009. But it doesn't come anywhere close to covering the deficit of $1.5 trillion.
"Barack Obama was the first president to sign a budget with a $1 trillion deficit into law. In fact, all the taxpayers -- including the ones who get a refund check bigger than the withholding taxes they paid -- have the money." The point of this is next time you hear Obama or a Democrat say we've got to raise taxes on the rich, it's not about getting revenue to run the government because they don't have the money. Now, I've been doing this show for 23 years, and I have been employing this data, whatever the accurate data was for the year I was disclosing it, it hasn't changed in terms of percentages. Confiscate every dollar earned by people who make $10 million a year or more and you run the country for barely over two weeks. That has not changed since I first heard of this statistic 23, 25 years ago. It hasn't changed. As it is, these people are already paying 70% of the total income tax burden! So there's no economic growth hidden away here in a tax increase on these people.
How does taking money out of the private sector grow it? And that's what tax increases do. How in the world does taking money out of the private sector cause it to grow? Mathematically impossible, folks. From Reuters: "Total adjusted gross income reported on tax returns, measured in 2009 dollars, was $7.626 trillion, down from $8.233 trillion in 2008 and $8.989 trillion in 2007. Total adjusted gross income was up only slightly from the $7.475 trillion reported in 2001, when there were 10 million fewer taxpayers."
Individual tax collections equaled 15.4% of all income. "Doubling federal income taxes for everyone would still leave us $400 billion or so shy of balancing the budget." That's the bottom line. Doubling federal income taxes for everybody would raise $1.1 trillion, $400 billion shy of the deficit. I know these numbers are hard to follow, but all this is gonna be on RushLimbaugh.com later today, and I suggest you go there, print it out, or e-mail it, make electronic copies, PDF, whatever you want, and spread this around. This needs to be seen by many people. It's not going to be in the US media.

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