Good Seattle Times Colmun on Taxes(!)

[jon]

Sorry it's not a graph

 

http://wire.inc.com/2012/02/06/small-business-tax-system-favors-big-corporations-the-wealthy/

[j_b]

Soaking the Poor, State by State

By Kevin Drum

 

[..]

The Corporation for Enterprise Development recently released a scorecard for all 50 states, and it has boatloads of useful information. That includes overall tax rates, where data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent. Lucky duckies indeed. There's not one single state with a tax system that's progressive.

 

 

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/soaking-poor-state-state

[dougd]

That's it, I'm movin to DC...

 

d

[j_b]

It may be what you have to do if you don't want to pay a greater tax rate than Romney pays thanks to an overall regressive taxation scheme. Isn't it revealing how conservatives only talk about fed income tax and ignore the elephant in the room?

[j_b]

Of the 280 profitable Fortune 500 corporations included in our November federal study, 265 fully disclosed their state and local income tax payments.1 Here are some of the key facts that these companies’ annual reports reveal:

 

• Between 2008 and 2010, these 265 companies paid state income taxes equal to only 3.0 percent of their U.S. profits. Since the average statutory state corporate tax rate is about 6.2 percent (weighted by gross state product), that means that over this period, fully half of their profits escaped state taxes entirely.

 

• 68 of the 265 companies managed to pay no state income tax at all in at least one year from 2008 through 2010, despite telling their shareholders they made almost$117 billion in pretax U.S. profits in those no-tax years. 16 of these companies enjoyed multiple no-tax years.

 

• Some companies, such as DuPont, Goodrich, International Paper and Intel, paid no net state income tax over the full three year period.

 

• In 2009 alone, 32 companies paid no state income tax. Another 105 of the companies paid less than half the weighted-average statutory state corporate tax rate that year, meaning that fully one half of the companies in our sample paid less than half the average state tax rate.

 

• Perhaps most striking, if these 265 corporations had paid the 6.2 percent average state corporate tax rate on the$1.33 trillion in U.S. profits that they reported to their shareholders, they would have paid $82.6 billion in state corporate income taxes over the 2008-10 period. Instead, they paid only $39.9 billion. Thus, these 265 companies avoided a total of $42.7 billion in state corporate income taxes over the three years.

http://www.itepnet.org/pdf/CorporateTaxDodgers50StatesReport.pdf

[j_b]

Proof that JayB doesn't really know what goes into the charts he posts here:

Next up, inequality denial. The Census Gini figure (which measures income distribution in a population) hasn’t moved much since the early 1990s — but as Jon Chait, a writer at New York Magazine, says, we know perfectly well why: it’s because Census numbers are “top-coded,” that is, cut off at high income levels, and the big gains have come way up the scale.

 

“The Census Department does not collect detailed information about rich people’s income, which is why inequality researchers look elsewhere when they want to study changing income among the very rich,” Mr. Chait wrote in an online post on Feb. 3.

http://www.truth-out.org/conservatives-twist-economic-debate/1329850101

 

 

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Proof that JayB doesn't really know what goes into the charts he posts here:

Next up, inequality denial. The Census Gini figure (which measures income distribution in a population) hasn’t moved much since the early 1990s — but as Jon Chait, a writer at New York Magazine, says, we know perfectly well why: it’s because Census numbers are “top-coded,” that is, cut off at high income levels, and the big gains have come way up the scale.

 

“The Census Department does not collect detailed information about rich people’s income, which is why inequality researchers look elsewhere when they want to study changing income among the very rich,” Mr. Chait wrote in an online post on Feb. 3.

http://www.truth-out.org/conservatives-twist-economic-debate/1329850101

 

 

TRUTH OUT DOT ORG!!!

 

 

 

[j_b]

Actually, it's a Paul Krugman column, but Truthout has great columnists like Reich, Stiglitz, Hedges, etc .. Not that it would make any difference to a Fox "news" lemming.

[Mtguide]

Man; very interesting to see that ratt 'chere in the good 'ole supposedly "enlightened" and "progressive" Pac. NW, Washington is one of the worst, and Oregon not all that far behind, in terms of income tax disparity/ inequality.

[KaskadskyjKozak]

Actually, it's a Paul Krugman column, but Truthout has great columnists like Reich, Stiglitz, Hedges, etc .. Not that it would make any difference to a Fox "news" lemming.

 

KRUGMAN

 

[JayB]

Proof that JayB doesn't really know what goes into the charts he posts here:

Next up, inequality denial. The Census Gini figure (which measures income distribution in a population) hasn’t moved much since the early 1990s — but as Jon Chait, a writer at New York Magazine, says, we know perfectly well why: it’s because Census numbers are “top-coded,” that is, cut off at high income levels, and the big gains have come way up the scale.

 

“The Census Department does not collect detailed information about rich people’s income, which is why inequality researchers look elsewhere when they want to study changing income among the very rich,” Mr. Chait wrote in an online post on Feb. 3.

http://www.truth-out.org/conservatives-twist-economic-debate/1329850101

 

 

1. What is the definition of rich per the Census?

 

2. Did the Census Bureau suddenly stop collecting income on rich households in the early 90's. If not - then you'd have to have data that demonstrated that the change in the number and magnitude of the incomes beyond whatever arbitrary cut-off they used after the said date had a material impact on the metric.

 

3. It's possible that they don't include household's beyond $500K/year because there aren't that many of them.

 

The original point was that the vast majority of the change in the gini coefficient since the early 70's has been driven by the fragmentation of low-income families into separate households with an average of less than one full-time wage earner per household (vs the top quintile where the number of wage earners per household increased, and the divorce rate leveled off roughly a generation ago), and the diversion of more compensation into non-cash benefits.

 

Did you ever post data that refutes those points?

[JayB]

Man; very interesting to see that ratt 'chere in the good 'ole supposedly "enlightened" and "progressive" Pac. NW, Washington is one of the worst, and Oregon not all that far behind, in terms of income tax disparity/ inequality.

Does this make you feel any better?

http://andrewgbiggs.blogspot.com/2008/12/is-social-security-tax-regressive-once.html

[j_b]

1. What is the definition of rich per the Census?

 

2. Did the Census Bureau suddenly stop collecting income on rich households in the early 90's. If not - then you'd have to have data that demonstrated that the change in the number and magnitude of the incomes beyond whatever arbitrary cut-off they used after the said date had a material impact on the metric.

 

all valid questions that you should have asked of yourself before posting that misleading chart.

 

 

 

Did you ever post data that refutes those points?

 

I didn't have to since you failed to substantiate your point with meaningful data (your gini curve that excludes the highest earners from the analysis) and you didn't consider whether dislocated families result from economic hardship rather than the opposite (economic hardship resulting from family dislocation), As for the total compensation bit, you haven't replied as to how total compensation has increased yet legacy pensions have all but disappeared and there is a smaller fraction of employees who have employer paid health care plans, and workers usually pay a greater share of these programs that are typically worth less.

[j_b]

Warren Buffett on corporate taxes:

[video:youtube]

 

"The interesting thing about the corporate rate is that corporate profits, as a percentage of GDP last year were the highest or just about the highest in the last 50 years. They were ten and a fraction percent of GDP. That’s higher than we’ve seen in 50 years. The corporate taxes as a percentage of GDP were 1.2 percent, $180 billion. That’s just about the lowest we’ve seen. So our corporate tax rate last year, effectively, in terms of taxes paid for the United States, was around 12 percent, which is well below those existing in most of the industrialized countries around the world. So it is a myth that American corporations are paying 35 percent or anything like it…Corporate taxes are not strangling American competitiveness."