Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

Post by Dardedar »

This is from August of 2009, but still useful:

Who's to Blame for the Deficit Numbers?

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http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/ ... rs.html/#1
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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See also:

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And: "So DO Tax Cuts Create Jobs?" LINK

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-john ... 43500.html
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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New study agrees with old study: Deficits are largely the result of Great Recession, wars and Bush tax cuts:

Dissecting the Deficit

"My colleagues Kathy Ruffing and Jim Horney have shown that the economic downturn, President Bush’s tax cuts, and the legacy of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan explain virtually the entire federal budget deficit projected for the rest of this decade (that is, through 2019). That is, there would be practically no deficits over that period if the tax cuts, the wars, and the downturn had not occurred and other policies remained the same. This widely circulated CBPP chart makes their point vividly.

Last week columnist Robert Samuelson looked at a related — but different — question, one that looks backward in time rather than forward: why did the federal government amass large deficits between 2002 and 2011, rather than the large surpluses that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected in early 2001?

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Over the 2002-2011 period, the negative budgetary impact of so-called “economic and technical” changes — most notably, the 2001 and 2007-2009 downturns — dwarfed that of any single legislative change that policymakers enacted. Samuelson cites an analysis of CBO data that accordingly ascribes about a quarter of the deterioration in the budget over that period to President Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The 2002-2011 period is now history. For the years ahead, CBPP found that the tax cuts (if policymakers extend them in full) and the wars, plus the lingering effects of the recent downturn, essentially account for the entire deficit between now and 2019. Indeed, the tax cuts and the wars alone account for nearly half of the public debt by 2019."

http://www.offthechartsblog.org/dissecting-the-deficit/
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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What are the federal government’s sources of revenue?

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http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing ... evenue.cfm
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Ten Numbers the Rich Would Like Fudged

The numbers reveal the deadening effects of inequality in our country, and confirm that tax avoidance, rather than a lack of middle-class initiative, is the cause.

1. Only THREE PERCENT of the very rich are entrepreneurs.

According to both Market watch and economist Edward Wolff, over 90 percent of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), personal business accounts, the stock market, and real estate. Only 3.6 percent of taxpayers in the top .1% were classified as entrepreneurs based on 2004 tax returns. A 2009 Kauffman Foundation study found that the great majority of entrepreneurs come from middle-class backgrounds, with less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs coming from very rich or very poor backgrounds.

2. Only FOUR OUT OF 150 countries have more wealth inequality than us.

In a world listing compiled by a reputable research team (which nevertheless prompted double-checking), the U.S. has greater wealth inequality than every measured country in the world except for Namibia, Zimbabwe, Denmark, and Switzerland.

3. An amount equal to ONE-HALF the GDP is held untaxed overseas by rich Americans.

The Tax Justice Network estimated that between $21 and $32 trillion is hidden offshore, untaxed. With Americans making up 40% of the world's Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, that's $8 to $12 trillion in U.S. money stashed in far-off hiding places.

Based on a historical stock market return of 6%, up to $750 billion of income is lost to the U.S. every year, resulting in a tax loss of about $260 billion.

4. Corporations stopped paying HALF OF THEIR TAXES after the recession.

After paying an average of 22.5% from 1987 to 2008, corporations have paid an annual rate of 10% since. This represents a sudden $250 billion annual loss in taxes.

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U.S. corporations have shown a pattern of tax reluctance for more than 50 years, despite building their businesses with American research and infrastructure. They've passed the responsibility on to their workers. For every dollar of workers' payroll tax paid in the 1950s, corporations paid three dollars. Now it's 22 cents.

5. Just TEN Americans made a total of FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS in one year.

That's enough to pay the salaries of over a million nurses or teachers or emergency responders.

That's enough, according to 2008 estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN's World Food Program, to feed the 870 million people in the world who are lacking sufficient food.

For the free-market advocates who say "they've earned it": Point #1 above makes it clear how the wealthy make their money.

6. Tax deductions for the rich could pay off 100 PERCENT of the deficit.

Another stat that required a double-check. Based on research by the Tax Policy Center, tax deferrals and deductions and other forms of tax expenditures (tax subsidies from special deductions, exemptions, exclusions, credits, capital gains, and loopholes), which largely benefit the rich, are worth about 7.4% of the GDP, or about $1.1 trillion.

Other sources have estimated that about two-thirds of the annual $850 billion in tax expenditures goes to the top quintile of taxpayers."

The rest, with references... HERE
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Great pile of charts from the NYT's:

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How the Tax Burden Has Changed

"Most Americans paid less in taxes in 2010 than people with the same inflation-adjusted incomes paid in 1980, because of cuts in federal income taxes. At lower income levels, however, much of the savings was offset by increases in federal payroll taxes, state sales taxes and local property taxes. About half of households making less than $25,000 saved nothing at all."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012 ... tml?ref=us

And The Atlantic:

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...
Who Got the Biggest Tax Break in the Last 30 Years? (The Rich, of Course)

LINK
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Five charts that will make you feel better about paying your taxes

Posted by Ezra Klein on April 15, 2013

"...Your 2012 tax return has a lot to recommend it. Here’s why, in charts.

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"Tax revenues are only expected to be 15.8 percent of GDP in 2012. They’ve not been above 16 percent of GDP since 2008. But before 2008, you have to go back to 1950 to find a year when they were below 16 percent of GDP. So taxes really were historically low last year.
That’s not necessarily a good thing. It’s partly attributable to the weak economy, and partly attributable to the huge raft of tax cuts passed to strengthen the economy (the payroll tax cut, the extended Bush tax cuts, the stimulus tax cuts, etc). But the facts are the facts: Taxes were really low in 2012.
Of course, this is also a reason to feel worse about your taxes next year. In 2013, they’re expected to jump back up to 16.8 percent of GDP, in part because the economy is getting better and in part because we’ve raised taxes."

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"The Congressional Budget Office has the data on the “effective federal tax rate” paid by all income quintiles since 2009. That is to say, the real tax rate that people actually paid on their taxes — so it includes payroll taxes, and deductions, and all the rest of it. And guess what? It’s been falling! And it’s fallen, in particular, for low-income folks."

The rest: Washington Post
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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"...the OECD data shows sharp declines in the corporate tax share of total tax revenue in most of the large countries.
For example, in the United States corporate income taxes as a share of GDP dropped from 4.1 percent in 1965 to 2.7 percent in 2010. In Japan the share declined from 4.0 percent to 3.2 percent. In Germany the drop was from 2.5 percent to 1.5 percent. In Canada corporate income taxes declined as a share of GDP from 3.8 percent in 1965 to 3.3 percent in 2010. In the United Kingdom there was a rise over this period from 1.3 percent of GDP to 3.1 percent, but the latter is down sharply from a 4.7 percent share of corporate income taxes in GDP in 1985, so there has not been an upward trend there either.
For those interested, here is the long-term picture in the United States."

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LINK
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Re: Tax Whoppers the right likes to spread

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Taxes: Who Pays How Much in Eight Charts

Ideological arguments about whether taxes are too high or too low miss the crucial question of who ends up bearing how much of the burden of financing our public sector.

There’s an inescapable reality surrounding that question: unlike corporations and the ultra-rich, America’s working majority have neither the lobbyists to write loopholes into the tax code, nor the financial planners and high-end tax accountants to exploit them.

The result, as economist Joseph E. Stiglitz tells Bill Moyers, is a system that is fundamentally unfair. Here are eight charts that illustrate how our tax burden has shifted over the years, and why we need to reform our tax code.

The US Is One of the Least Taxed Countries

Here’s some important context: Overall, we pay relatively little in taxes today compared to other wealthy countries.

Of the 24 countries that were members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1979, the US paid the 16th highest share of its economic output in taxes.

Fast-forward to 2010, and the US was the third least taxed country, ranking 32nd out of 34 OECD countries in terms of taxes as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). As the graph below shows, only two countries, Chile and Mexico, paid less in taxes than the US did in 2010. And as the green bar shows, the 24.8 percent we forked over in taxes was significantly less than the average of 33.4 percent that the other 33 countries paid."

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The rest here.
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer
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