We The People Act or Why Ron Paul is a Crazy Person

[mrstickball]

rocketpig said:

mrstickball said:

rocketpig said:
Laughably inaccurate, yes. But there is an underlying truth to the concept that over the past 30 years, the rich have been able to minimize their paid taxes while the burden for the middle class has remained relatively consistent.

But graphs like this are no better than Romney replying to a commenter "all money ends up going to an individual!" On the surface, they're true but they lack the nuance and maturity needed to enter into complex conversations about difficult problems.

Not true.

Effective federal tax rates among the bottom 50% have dropped 65% since the 1980's. Comparatively, effective federal tax rates among the top 1% have dropped only 30%. The middle and lower class pay a lot less than they have before. The only taxes that have stayed at similar levels are payroll taxes, which are generally mitigated by their other offsets (such as insane deductions and rebates that usually give them back more than they paid in).

Bloomberg Businessweek has a slightly different take on it.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-17/how-to-pay-no-taxes-10-strategies-used-by-the-rich

"For the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income, the effective federal income tax rate—what they actually pay—fell from almost 30 percent in 1995 to just over 18 percent in 2008, according to the Internal Revenue Service. And for the approximately 1.4 million people who make up the top 1 percent of taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent in 2008. It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so."

And that's just since 1995. 

 

Way to take a very specific sub-set of data and skew it to your liking.

Wonder why they only go back to 1995?

http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0#table1

Go look at Table 6. In 1980, the Top 1% paid 19.05% of all income taxes. Today, its 37%.

Their chart is extremely disigenous. Although the effective rate among the top 400 has gone down since 1995, their share has increased significantly over the past 32 years. Additionally, the statement fails to mention what the effective rate among the other percentiles paid (I wonder why....?)

As per Table 8, the effecitve tax rate among the bottom 50% dropped from 4.39% in 1995 to 1.85% in 2009. Or a 58% drop in their effective tax rate. My statement still stands, and there is the data to prove it. By comparison, the top 1%'s effective tax rate dropped just 15% over the same period.