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Good Seattle Times Colmun on Taxes(!)


JayB

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One more time: Our taxes are OK

 

Be honest: Do you pay more than Mitt? [No - and neither does Buffet's Secretary]

 

The release of Mitt Romney's tax returns — the news he paid 13.9 percent of his earnings in income taxes — has rocketed one of my pet crusades back to the top of the charts.

 

Which is: We are clueless how low our taxes really are.

 

Apparently many of my brethren in the media must pay more in taxes than Mitt. A lot more. Because his taxes were described in most headlines this week as "low," and his effective tax rate as "only" 13.9 percent. Some portrayed his burden as "startlingly light" (New York Times' Paul Krugman.)

 

The tax man must also gouge Democrats much deeper than Mitt. Because they responded as if Romney — who paid $3 million on earnings of $21.7 million in 2010 — is a freeloader.

 

"Mitt Romney used every loophole in the book available to the wealthiest and large corporations to avoid paying his fair share," said the Democratic National Committee.

 

"The president believes that it is not fair — inherently not fair — that millionaires and billionaires pay at a lower rate than average Americans who are struggling to get by," said President Obama's press secretary.

 

Even some Republicans ribbed Romney. Newt Gingrich offered to name his 15 percent flat-tax plan the Mitt Tax. So that "all Americans could then pay the rate Romney paid. I think that's terrific."

 

I must be some sort of slacker, because I have to admit: I pay less than Mitt. I'm not going to release my tax returns until I make my run for president, so for now you'll just have to believe me. But I do routinely pay a lower effective federal tax rate than the lowly Mitt

 

But here's the thing: So, most likely, do you. Because according to the IRS, more than 90 percent of Americans pay at a lower effective rate than Mitt.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2017324261_danny25.html

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Like I said:

 

While not a Repub fan, I gotta say the hub-bub about how much Federal tax Mitt pays is BS. The vast majority of Americans don't pay 15% of their AGI in Federal Tax. With all the deductions for houses, kids, whatever, most Americans are below this rate. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html#table8

 

Yea, yea, theres SS/Medicare but that was not caluclated in Mitt's returns either. So as ususal Americans are about their high taxes. Not!

 

You are never going to get what is needed to get a more balanced budget by trying to milk the top 2%. A more reasonable approach would be to let ALL Bush era tax cuts expire, bump up the capital gains tax, and remove the SS cap on taxes.

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I'd love to hear your argument why the carried income tax loophole is justified and should be continued.

 

It may not be and I wouldn't particularly care if it were eliminated. I'm for lower, flatter tax rates that have zero exemptions for anything. I think that the optimal tax rate on capital gains and dividends is zero, but that'll never happen so I'd be happy to compromise by taxing all income at fixed flat rates.

 

Aside from being way more efficient (way easier to prepare taxes, way harder to defraud the government, way less incentive to bribe congress to give you a special exemption, way less incentive to engage in convoluted and wasteful behavior just to dodge taxes, etc), it'd be much easier for the average person to avoid getting confused by the difference between things like the top marginal rate and the effective tax rate.

 

The point of the article, which is backed up by all of the statistical data, is that all of this business about the rich paying a lower tax rate than Warren Buffet's secretary is a flat out crock. Even with the lower capital gains rate, and every other tax preference Romney's effective tax rate is still higher than 90% of all taxpayers, half of whom either pay no income tax or have a negative income tax. The more money you make, the higher your effective federal tax rate, and the higher your share of all federal taxes paid.

 

Factor in the value of all taxes (state, local, federal) and net out the value of all income transfers and this is what the effective tax rate looks like:

 

 

howprogressiveareourtaxesfollowup-figure2-version2.png

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Like I said:

 

While not a Repub fan, I gotta say the hub-bub about how much Federal tax Mitt pays is BS. The vast majority of Americans don't pay 15% of their AGI in Federal Tax. With all the deductions for houses, kids, whatever, most Americans are below this rate. http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html#table8

 

Yea, yea, theres SS/Medicare but that was not caluclated in Mitt's returns either. So as ususal Americans are about their high taxes. Not!

 

You are never going to get what is needed to get a more balanced budget by trying to milk the top 2%. A more reasonable approach would be to let ALL Bush era tax cuts expire, bump up the capital gains tax, and remove the SS cap on taxes.

 

Agree with just about all of that. The only major quibble I have is that the current fiction about SS is that it's not a welfare program to keep people who didn't save enough on their own from being destitute, it's a compulsory retirement program in which people's Social Security payments are funded by their own contributions.

 

If that's the case, then there's no need to tax income above a certain threshold because the odds that someone clearing $500K per year is going to need SS to keep him off of the cat-food diet are next to zero.

 

If we did eliminate the exemption but still maintained the fiction that it's simply a compulsory retirement savings where each persons savings covers' their payouts, I'd be in favor of lifting the cap until a particular person sets aside enough money to fund the benefits that they are entitled to. Make Bill Gates pay 1.5 million in SS taxes for one year and then he's done.

 

I personally think that since SS is actually a welfare program, it makes much more sense to admit as much and start lowering the SS tax and means-testing it so that we're not sending Bill Gates a check that he doesn't need to keep himself from destitution in his old age.

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Well, this is quite a turn around: from decades long litany of regressive complaints about high taxes "extorted through force" to "we are clueless about how low our taxes really are" LOLZ ... Laughable opportunism!

 

It also appears that regressives finally gave up on trying to have us believe that official tax rates are to be taken literally but instead admit that effective tax rates are much lower. It only took decades for them to admit it but there is progress, although we can be certain they'll fall back into the former behavior at the next opportunity.

 

this business about the rich paying a lower tax rate than Warren Buffet's secretary is a flat out crock

 

Strawman alert: Obama and Buffett didn't claim that all billionaires paid a smaller fraction of their income in taxes than the middle class. They said that some billionaires like Romney and Buffett paid a smaller % than some middle class people, and that should never happen.

 

I think that the optimal tax rate on capital gains and dividends is zero

 

except there is no evidence for your assertion, whereas there is plenty of evidence showing that higher tax on capital doesn't impede economic growth and enables development.

 

 

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Yea, yea, theres SS/Medicare but that was not caluclated in Mitt's returns either. So as ususal Americans are about their high taxes. Not!

 

Remember both SS and Medicare are caped and Mitt doesn't have any payroll taxes so - usual disingenuity from the Anti-Tax dipshits aside - many more people pay more in taxes than Mitt. I've certainly paid more as a % some years.

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Yea, yea, theres SS/Medicare but that was not caluclated in Mitt's returns either. So as ususal Americans are about their high taxes. Not!

 

Remember both SS and Medicare are caped and Mitt doesn't have any payroll taxes so - usual disingenuity from the Anti-Tax dipshits aside - many more people pay more in taxes than Mitt. I've certainly paid more as a % some years.

 

It's weird to count SS and Medicare as taxes, particularly so for people in the lower end of the pay-scale, for two reasons.

 

The first is that they were and are sold as mechanisms by which people set aside their own personal money to finance their own personal benefits - essentially a forced savings program.

 

The second is that the less money you make, the more likely you are to get far more money out of those programs than you paid into them.

 

"Summary:

For people with lower than average earnings, the

ratio of the lifetime benefits they receive from Social

Security to the lifetime payroll taxes they pay for the

program is higher than it is for people with higher

average earnings. In that sense, the Social Security

system is progressive. For people in the bottom fifth of

the earnings distribution, the ratio of benefits to taxes

is almost three times as high as it is for those in the top

fifth.

 

http://cbo.gov/ftpdocs/77xx/doc7705/12-15-Progressivity-SS.pdf

 

screen-shot-2011-09-26-at-9-31-06-pm.png

 

In any event, when you factor in all taxes minus transfer payments you get the chart above. People who make less money pay a much lower effective net tax rate.

 

The tax system that was structured to be progressive is very progressive. The less money you make, the lower your real tax rate, and it'll even go negative if your income is low enough, and the value of the benefits that you get will exceed the value of the taxes that you pay. The higher your income, the higher your real tax rate, the the value of the benefits that you receive will be dramatically less than the value of the taxes that you pay.

 

That's the reality. The only people who are upset are the people who are pretending it's otherwise, despite the mountain of statistical data to the contrary.

 

 

 

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The first is that they were and are sold as mechanisms by which people set aside their own personal money to finance their own personal benefits - essentially a forced savings program.

 

You'd be a lot more credible if you weren't spending the rest of your time on this issue arguing that SS should be dilapidated and benefits cut.

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Romney published one or 2 (?) years of his tax return when he was preparing to run for the presidency and we are supposed to believe that he always pays 14% in taxes ...

 

Some years I pay more than 14% if you REALLY want to know! and I am not sure why you would since it is irrelevant to this discussion.

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I guess KKK isn't going to explain to us how someone's ability to pay more than Romney's paltry 14% on ~$21 million investment income would somehow change the established fact that taxation overall isn't progressive as Washington residents know especially well.

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