Friday, February 19, 2010

What's Wrong With This?

I am sweating my 2009 taxes because I didn't have taxes taken out of my unemployment 'income' and I read things like this.
The top 400 U.S. individual taxpayers got 1.59% of the nation’s household income in 2007, according to their tax returns, three times the slice they got in the 1990s, according to the  Internal Revenue Service. They paid 2.05% of all individual income taxes in that year.
In its annual update of the taxes paid by the 400 best-off taxpayers, who aren’t identified, the IRS also said that only 220 of the top 400 were in the top marginal tax bracket. The 400 best-off taxpayers paid an average tax rate of 16.6%, lower than in any year since the IRS began making the reports in 1992.
To make the top 400, a taxpayer had to have income of more than $138.8 million. As a group, the top 400 reported $137.9 billion in income, and paid $22.9 billion in federal income taxes.
I am unemployed and my effective tax rate is going to be higher than 16.6%.. Now I am all for the folks that have everything getting to enjoy the good life and if I was one of them I would spend money like no tomorrow. I would be a one man stimulus in a big way but there is something fundamentally wrong with a tax system when nearly half of the nation's richest are not even in the top tax bracket. This new deficit commission should maybe look into this?

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