"thunder" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 31 Aug 2005 14:35:28 +0000, NOYB wrote:


The progressive tax system that we currently use has the top 1% of wage
earners paying 32% of the taxes. The top 5% paying 50.1%. The top 10%
paying 63.5%. And the top 20% paying 78% of all income taxes.

So the "less wealthy" (as you like to call them) only pay 20% of the tax
burden. Is that equitable?

Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors. You can't look at the "progressive
tax" and ignore all the regressive taxes when looking at total tax
burdens. Federal income taxes make up less than half of the tax burden.
While they are mildly progressive, the other tax revenues are quite
regressive.

And, let's not concentrate only on federal taxes. There has been a
considerable shift in the tax burden, from federal to more regressive
state and local taxes. Besides, your data is old. Using newer, 2004
data, let's look at the true tax burden. While it's true, the top 1% paid
32.8% as percentage of income, they also had 19.1% of the total income.

Read the numbers, our tax structure is getting quite close to being a flat
tax structure.

Good! It should be a flat tax structure.


http://www.ctj.org/pdf/fsl2004.pdf

"combined federal, state and local taxes on the wealthiest one percent of
Americans will equal 32.8 percent *of income* this year. For all other
income groups, combined taxes will average 29.4 percent *of income*."

(Not quite equal yet)