mrstickball said:
richardhutnik said:
mrstickball said:
richardhutnik said:
mrstickball said:
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Except the fact that the total burden of taxes in America for the top 1% is higher today than at any point in the past 60 years.
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I am going to call bull on the above and ask you to prove it. You are saying the past 60 years? Now is your chance to correct and clarify, or defend this. If you want to say the top 1% pays a greater percentage now, it would be because they have more money and the middle class is shrinking.
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Its quite a bit faster than the increase of income inequality. The top 1% pays more taxes than the bottom 95%.
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That is not the past 60 years. I called bull on the past 60 years regarding this. Also, you are looking at who is paying what taxes here. This is different than how much they pay as a percentage of their income. What would be needed to be seen, to fully argue what was argued is that the percentage of their incomes they pay in taxes is higher now than the past 60 years or so.
This goes into details into what is going on, and their increase in income:
http://www.factcheck.org/2008/05/top-1-what-they-make-and-pay/
Why does the tax show up like this? Well, it is because their income is in the higher tax bracket, because they are pulling in more money now than the past. As income grows and the differential increases, the income in the differential is at the higher tax brackets. If the income growth were more evenly spread, then you wouldn't see this.
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Unfortunately, I haven't seen data that goes back prior to 1980. However, given the data, its very unlikely that the trend was much different. Unless you can provide something that would suggest otherwise.
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Longer would be useful to give things perspective. However, I will doubt that anyone can say that the effective tax rate on the top 1% is at the highest rate it has been in 60 years. Paying more of a percentage of taxes is explained by the above though.
Well, all this then points to a potential problem systemically with the economy. If you are running deficits, with those who aren't at the top falling further and further behind so you can't raise their taxes (and cutting benefits to them accelerates things) then you are faced with a situation where the economy is stuck, and not able to end up freeing up sufficient additional revenues to invest, and thus damages itself long term. What has been going on is the tax rate on the high end has continued to be reduced, and the economy is losing the middle class. Could be now there is a systemic structural flaws that would doom the American economy at this point.
