Dear Democrats: stop the demagoguery
February 12, 2012Because the 1% is already paying its "fair share".
The snippet below comes from a post by Clive Crook about income inequality. He includes some interesting comments about the US tax system. (My emphasis.)
If anything, rich Americans contribute a greater share of taxes than do their peers in other industrialized nations. The top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers paid 40 percent of federal income taxes in 2007. The top 1 percent of British taxpayers paid 24 percent of the corresponding total.
A new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development shows that in the middle of the last decade — i.e., after the Bush tax cuts were introduced — the U.S. income tax was about as strongly redistributive as income taxes in Canada, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden. You might have noticed that the CBO report on top incomes was widely quoted, but one finding got less attention: Between 1979 and 2007, “the federal individual income tax became slightly more progressive.”
The awkward truth is that the U.S. income tax system is anomalous not because it taxes the rich lightly but because it taxes everybody else lightly.
Or put in slightly different terms:
[…] we’ve noted here more than once, the US tax code doesn’t tax the rich too lightly — it taxes the […]