Posted on 05/26/2011 6:35:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Media reports in recent weeks say that Senate Democrats are considering a 3% surtax on income over $1 million to raise federal revenues. This would come on top of the higher income tax rates that President Obama has already proposed through the cancellation of the Bush era tax-rate reductions.
If the Democrats' millionaire surtax were to happen—and were added to other tax increases already enacted last year and other leading tax hike ideas on the table this year—this could leave the U.S. with a combined federal and state top tax rate on earnings of 62%. That's more than double the highest federal marginal rate of 28% when President Reagan left office in 1989. Welcome back to the 1970s.
Here's the math behind that depressing calculation. Today's top federal income tax rate is 35%. Almost all Democrats in Washington want to repeal the Bush tax cuts on those who make more than $250,000 and phase out certain deductions, so the effective income tax rate would rise to about 41.5%. The 3% millionaire surtax raises that rate to 44.5%.
But payroll taxes, which are income taxes on wages and salaries, must also be included in the equation. So we have to add about 2.5 percentage points for the payroll tax for Medicare (employee and employer share after business deductions), which was applied to all income without a ceiling in 1993 as part of the Clinton tax hike. I am including in this analysis the employer share of all payroll taxes because it is a direct tax on a worker's salary and most economists agree that though employers are responsible for collecting this tax, it is ultimately borne by the employee. That brings the tax rate to 47%.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
bada bing
and the AMT started to tax the middle class the first year bamster took office :-(
Old people love high interest rates, and they love to vote for their own interest (no pun intended). You will see a Congo line of wheel chairs and walkers if they can get good returns on their savings, and to hell with what it means to anything else.
..because they know Republicans will block them and they want to muddy the deficit issue for the 2012 election.
My argument AGAINST these taxes would be different than the standard arguments that are popular here and that talk radio has repeated a million times(which are not working anymore BTW) :
If tax increase on the rich are such a great idea then why didnt Obama and Pelosi do them in 2009 and 2010 when they had 59 Senators and only needed 50 to pass it like they did the Obama-care budget reconciliation? In fact they could have raised taxes on the rich and extended some of the Bush middle class tax cuts and still used reconciliation as long as it's scored deficit neutral, and still protected 9 Democrat Senators who could vote against it. Why (Democrats) did you wait till Republicans got power to demand what you could have done yourselves easily without them but what you (Democrats) refused to do yourselves?
Hopefully by now you understand why they didnt raise taxes themselves: to keep this an issue for 2012. Republicans are losing on this issue which is sad, and I don't think Rush is giving them political advice that will win the argument.
Then we could tell who really wants higher taxes and higher gov't spending.
thanks, I have thought of that many times in fact I remember how in the 1990s an unknown Huckabee pulled that on Democrats in AK and was reported on both Rushs's shows and I thought it was clever, cant understand why congressional Republicans never do stuff like that.
Even a 240% real effective tax rate on the top tier won’t balance the budget.
So... good luck with the progressive wealth transfer programs for f’ing Marxist Democrats.
Pretty early to be hittin the sauce, eh?
In the 70’s I heard P.Harvey say that if we taxed all income above 50,000 at 100 percent, it would be enough to run the gov’t just a few days. Suck that RATS/RINOS.
The steady stream of left-wing ideas now coming out are to keep the left-wing voter base satisfied.
During election season, the WH doesn't want a return of -23 disapproval which happens when the left gets mad at Bozo & Friends.
B) You think Republican-dominated House of Representatives will go along with this idea?
If the democrats could stop their retail therapy problem they wouldn’t have to increase taxes.But that would be akin to asking a wino to give up his Night Train Express.
The bonus from this is that it would create millions of new jobs -- from Construction of the Asylums, to the equipment suppliers, and the Doctors, Nurses and general staff required for all the new Loony Bins. And since we'd now have millions of new workers, Bonus #2 is the Tax Base increases and the gubmint would rake in gazillions in new tax revenue. And Bonus #3 is this would also create millions of new Jobs from the openings at the Universities, High Schools, and Elementary Schools when all the Leftist-Democrats there go bye-bye to a padded cell.
In ten years our $14 Trillion dollar deficit would be zero.
And all we have to do is institutionalize all Democrats.
This is Hope and Change I can believe in.
:-)
Don’t try throwing logic or facts on this fire! What are you crazy?!?!?
I suppose the rich should pay extra to protect their wealth, e.g. common defense of the nation, but rich people don't really use more government services because they are rich so why charge them more?
It seems to me that for 40 years or so our government has developed and implemented lots of programs for poor people but they are still poor and now their next generation is poor with a few exceptions. We really should stand back and look at what in hell we are doing with the trillions of dollars that poor people receive each decade, supposedly to elevate them to 'rich' so that they can pay the poor, also.
I wonder how much it costs all of us, on average, to support one poor person for life? Is it $1 million or more? Also, how much is needed, say double? Of course, the more than passingly strange thing is that we have no input as to how poor people make decisions that impact their lives, we simply pay for a lot of those decisions.
We seem doomed in America, except poor people.
Heh heh.
What is good about this whole process is that we can see who the RINOs are.
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