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The federal budget deficit peaked in 2009 at $1.4 trillion. budget deficity

Total AGI for all taxpayers with adjusted gross income over $200k in 2008 was over $2.4 trillion. IRS Tax Stats

A trillion dollar surplus is going to make a nice impact on the debt too.

Of course the idea is preposterous, but nobody ever suggested taking all the income of the wealthiest people in the nation, and nobody is expecting to repair 30 years of brain dead tax and economic policies in 2 years.

And if we are going to use your ridiculous anecdote as a measure of increased taxation effectiveness we should also take the alternate scenario. Taxes are bad and cutting taxes is good so we should cut taxes on anyone making over $250k / year to 0% and then everyone will have the incentive to stop being poor or middle class and they'll do the work necessary to make $250k per year to avoid paying taxes. Utopia, LOL.

You're a lying moron.

What you have described is a myth that idiots tell each other, and has been repeatedly shot down in court and has absolutely no basis in fact or law at all.

In fact, what you have repeated are mix of the Frivilous Tax Arguments that will result in the IRS fining you if you try to use them in court.

So out of the 145million people that filed taxes it cost us 21k each over 15 years.
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/10taxstatscard.pdf

But think of all the innovation;
Remote controlled drones with missiles.
Armored K9's
Quiet Helicopters
Body Scans (would be nice if they could detect cancer or a tumor at least while i walk though)
um cannot really think of anything else we came up with for 3 trillion.

I think we got hosed on this deal.

Unless you're talking about the EITC, no, they don't. They simply refund you what you had withheld, nothing more. If you're talking the EITC, that's not anywhere *close* to 40% of the public. In 2004, it was about 7% of the population who claimed it, and most of those did not receive more back than they spent on income tax alone, let alone all taxes combined (EITC was designed to offset payroll taxes). The number of people getting more back than they spent on all taxes combined, including local and state taxes, is probably zero or close to it.

Concerning bracketed income taxation in general, we're not talking "redistribution of wealth". We're talking taxing luxury spending at a higher rate than non-luxury spending. Do you have a problem with that? if not, do you have a problem with the argument as to why it needs to be addressed on the income side rather than the expenditure side?

1) Have you ever even filed your own taxes? Do you not know how tax credits work? You make it sound like you think that the government cuts you a check if you come up negative.

Have you ever filed a 1040ez? The Earned Income Credit says just that:
"The Earned Income Tax Credit or the EITC is a refundable federal income tax credit for low to moderate income working individuals and families. Congress originally approved the tax credit legislation in 1975 in part to offset the burden of social security taxes and to provide an incentive to work. When EITC exceeds the amount of taxes owed, it results in a tax refund to those who claim and qualify for the credit."
http://www.irs.gov/individuals/article/0,,id=96406,00.html
I've gotten free money from eic before. Felt dirty but I needed it at the time.

No, the rich have a higher Federal income tax bracket, but they also have deductions the poor don't have. If you're paying 35% of your income in income tax, you have a terrible accountant.

A landlord buys a house to rent out, and his property taxes on that house are paid by the renter as part of his rent, and he doesn't even realise that he's paying that tax. There's $1,000 or more of your $8,000 right there.

The renter is also paying the interest on the mortgage as part of his rent, while the landlord gets to deduct that interest on his income taxes.

Then there's the onerous sales taxes. A poor person has to spend almost all his earnings to survive, so at 10% combined state, county, and municipal sales taxes (even higher in some places, like Chicago) he's paying an extra 10% tax on his income, where someone who spends 10% of his income and has enough left over to save is only paying 1% of his income in sales taxes.

Then there are various extra taxes; gasoline tax (a poor person spends far more of a percentage of his income in gasoline tax than a rich person who gets the same gas mileage and drives the same amount), cigarette taxes, liquor taxes, etc. Those taxes take up a far higher percentage of his income then they do a rich man's income.

Then there's FICA (Social Security). Bill gates pays the same dollar ammount in FICA as someone earning $75k/yr, since there's a $75k cap on the amount that's taxed. I pay 7.5% of my income (and my employer pays another 7.5% that he could afford to pay me were FICA not collected), while someone earning millions per year is paying far less than 1%. FICA is nothing to someone making vast sums of money.

With all the combined taxes, someone earning $20k/yr can easily be spending half his paycheck in various taxes.

The top Federal bracket is 35%, and that's before deductions. In Illinois you would add another 3% for state tax; Illinois is a very regressive flat tax state.

Slow? Hardly. You're the one not factoring in all the data.

I didn't even mention "bang for the buck" in my comment. The rich get a whole lot more use out of the government than the poor do. To a rich man, the police are the ones who try to keep him from getting robbed. To the poor man, the cop is someone who wants to put him in jail. Folks who own stock in Haliburton and Exxon make money off of war, the poor man dies in that war that he gets no benefit from whatever.

Me, I'm in the middle. I make about the median income for the US, more than the median for Illinois, where I live. I have my gadgets and beer and food and transportation and shelter, I do OK. You won't hear me bitching about the amount of tax I pay, but I will bitch about the amount of tax poor people pay, especially here in Illinois with its regressively flat income tax and high sales tax. My taxes are about right, the poor are paying too much, and the rich aren't paying anywhere near enough.

OK, I will bitch about paying more in taxes than someone who earns the same as me but is married. But I don't call for my taxes to be lowered, I call for his to be raised. Discrimination on the basis of marital status is just plain wrong.

Don't even think it's only Democrats that raise taxes, or you will be school in tax history.

Despite what others say Bush also raised taxes. Using data from the IRS [.xls] the "the top 1% of taxpayers - not only forked over a trillion dollars more to Uncle Sam under Bush than under Clinton, their share of the income tax burden increased from 33% to 38%."

Personally I say we get rid of personal income tax and replace it with a national sales tax as well as use taxes. Clothing, food, medicine, and other necessities of life would not be taxed but other things would be. Cars, computers, DVD movies, and such would be. And the use tax, as an example the miles a car is driven is taxed. Of course some would then say the government does not have enough revenue, to which I say revenue is not the problem, spending is the problem.

Falcon

They couldn't even muster the votes to kill the utterly irresponsible Bush tax cuts.

Except according to the IRS the wealthy top 1% increased the taxes they paid by more than a trillion dollars, they increased their burden from 33% to 38%. Boy oh boy that sounds really irresponsible. NOT!!!

But why is a Federal law needed here? Don't some states already require online retailers to collect sales tax?

Ignorant of the law too? The Internet Tax Freedom Act was signed by President Clinton in 1998 required states and local government to use use taxes for purchases made on the net. In some states when tax payers file for state income tax they are supposed to declare what purchases they made.

Of course if people had read the article linked to they would have learned that. I know it's too much to expect people to read articles but I wish they would before making stupid posts.

Falcon

Bush cut taxes

Bush cut taxes for the rich? Not according to the IRS [.xls]. Under Bush only the poor paid less in taxes, the wealthy paid more. The top 1% of taxpayers "not only forked over a trillion dollars more to Uncle Sam under Bush than under Clinton, their share of the income tax burden increased from 33% to 38%."

Falcon

here is the 2010 tax table. $100,000 in taxable income comes out to $21,000 for a single filer. If you're paying $10,000 in taxes, then your taxable income is $55,000 (or $70,000 if married). a $100,000 salary with 1 exemption and a standard deduction pays $19,098 in federal taxes.

This is not a bad plan. Keep in mind, if you spend 330 days / 365 days out of the US you get a 92K tax deduction. If you can find a cheap place to live, with decent internets (Thailand comes to mind, although I don't know how good the internet is) you could save a lot of money.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97130,00.html
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=96968,00.html

-Fran

This is not a bad plan. Keep in mind, if you spend 330 days / 365 days out of the US you get a 92K tax deduction. If you can find a cheap place to live, with decent internets (Thailand comes to mind, although I don't know how good the internet is) you could save a lot of money.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=97130,00.html
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=96968,00.html

-Fran

You seem to be under the impression that cash tips are generally logged properly such that taxes can be properly paid.

Failing to log and properly report the tip income is a crime (tax fraud), and unethical. I believe tips are generally logged properly. If you find reason to believe you have found some organization or person who is an exception, to logging tips properly, file IRS form 3949-A, with the appropriate information.

The law and the stiff penalties for intentionally disobeying it or negligently failing to keep the required records should be enough to ensure people log and report their tips properly. The IRS also has some special rules for food establishments.

As an employer, you must ensure that the total tip income reported to you during any pay period is, at a minimum, equal to 8% of your total receipts for that period..
When the total reported to you is less than 8%, you must allocate the difference between the actual tip income reported and 8% of gross receipts.

See also IRS form 2555-EZ: Foreign Earned Income Exclusion.

The USA generally avoids double taxation on incomes less than $91,400. But I think it requires a tax treaty with each country, so it's possible that you work somewhere where there there is no exemption for middle class income and below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_taxation
http://www.irs.gov/publications/p54/index.html

And I don't think it's safe to tell any tax authority to fuck off.

My understanding is that I am responsible to the IRS for taxes for the rest of my life, unless I renounce my citizenship (and even then, if I ever set foot on US soil again, the IRS can arrest me and hold me in jail, if they feel I renounced my citizenship for a tax break). If you can document something that lists x years (even if that x is 10 or longer) I'd love to know. I'm filing my taxes from abroad. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p54/ch01.html#en_US_2010_publink100047318 I don't see anything in the IRS rules where someone gets to stop filing if they've been overseas for some set period.

You mean "Kool-aid"? All I hear from progressives is "more government, no spending cuts, more regulation, bigger taxes", etc. No delusions at all.

I thought you'd be more sensitive to trademark infringement in a copyright infringement thread. Seriously though, explain to me why any of those are bad things. More government is what pulled the US out of the great depression, and this is the worst economic slump since then. No spending cuts isn't a bad thing, espicially when you consider the fact that the conservative definition of "spending cuts" means "social program cuts, but absolutely no cuts to the unending torrent of cash poured into the gaping maw of the military industrial complex". More regulation would definitley be a good thing, unless you suffer from some form of brain damage that causes you to believe that the reason we're currently in an economic crisis is because wall street and the mortgage brokers were overregulated, even though there were twelve straight years of de-regulation preceding the crisis. And anyone who has ever actually analyzed the history of income taxes in this country can tell you that bigger taxes on the rich results in a healthier middle class, which is what a government that plans on existing for any extended period of time should be trying to promote.

I don't know what you are talking about here. Only about half the population in the US pays income tax at all. The top 2% pay more than the bottom 95%. Corporate welfare and complicated tax incentives, breaks, and all that crazy crap isn't "conservative economic policy" - balanced budgets and smaller government that gets out of the way are what conservative policy [should] be about.

Really, the people who control almost the entirety of the wealth in this country pay most of the taxes? That would almost be fair if it weren't for the fact that it's a complete fucking lie. http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/indtaxstats/article/0,,id=129270,00.html clearly shows to anyone who understands basic division that the top two percent, actually contribute less than 50% of the tax income recieved by the US, even they control over 80 percent of the wealth. Please try again, this time check your numbers.

Conservative social policies...

Social authoritarians, regardless of political stripe, need to get out of the way. People own themselves and that should be respected. But the progressives want to control every aspect of everyone's life, including how much water and energy they are allowed to use, what they should eat, where they should live, etc., etc. Nice straw man there with the whole social authoritarian rant.

Education isn't a government function - maybe you could justify some government financial support for educating the less privileged, but you're so enamored with the monopolistic state indoctrination centers all you can complain about are the religious types trying to interject their views. Really?

Ok, we'll just have to agree to disagree here. You can go ahead and move to some spot where you'll be under the jurisdiction of a third world despot if you want to live in a country that forsakes education of the masses for the financial benefit of the rich, because there are plenty of them out there, I'm just guessing that you wouldn't actually want to live in any of them, because they're all horribly regressive shitholes where a silly religion would be forced upon you under penalty of death. Seriously, list one nation that doesn't have state sponsored educational programs that isn't a complete fucking hellhole. You can't, because they don't exist, because only a moron would want to live in a country run by people who were so stupid they didn't understand that education is the key to success in the modern world, and that it is literally in every single country's on best interest to ma

Legally, you do not have to pay any taxes until your file your tax return, but if you earn a taxable income of US$50,000.00, you will have to write a check for US$12,500.00 when you file your taxes.

Income taxes have to be paid throughout the year; if you are in a situation where you do not have an employer to do witholding on your income then you have to pay estimated tax payments. You can't just hold on to all the income tax money untill the end of the year and pay it in a lump sum; you'll be penalized for that.

http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/article/0,,id=110413,00.html

Considering that social security has not caused a single dime of debt so far, and in fact reduced to by a rather large amount due to lack of interest payments, perhaps we should work on the things that actually cause deficit now instead of pretending that it's an emergency that someday in the future, if no one does anything, we'll run out of money in the fund and might hypothetically pull money from general revenue.

We pull money now from the general fund for Social Security and CBO is projecting that we'll continued to do so for the indefinite future, unless Social Security is fixed of course.

Just like, um, Reagan, and Bush I. And Nixon.

Not Nixon. Public debt per GDP declined under Nixon. It also declined under Eisenhower.

You don't get to pretend all Republicans have been exceptionally bad at spending, and yet also claim the Republicans are the only people serious about it.

Who on the Democrat side at the federal level is serious about cutting spending? Obama threw in a budget that was more than a trillion over. Most of the Democrat survivors drove the spending in the last Congress. So yes, the Republicans with their ever so awesome record are the only game in town when it comes to federal spending reduction.

You mean the 'mockery' that's eventually going to cost us, oh, maybe $30 billion dollars? (Which, for viewers at home, is trivial, as I've pointed out.) And save an entire industry that employs hundreds of thousand of Americans.

What other mockery could I be talking about? Bankruptcy court was adequate for that task. And no, it didn't save the industry (probably doomed Ford too). We still have three crippled auto manufacturers who will go under next time this happens.

And of course, $30 billion is trivial. That's spending $100k or so per job "created or saved", most which I might add, would have been "created or saved" anyway in a bankruptcy.

Erm, do you even know what CORBA is? Employers do not pay it.

From here:

Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, certain individuals who are eligible for COBRA continuation health coverage, or similar coverage under state law, may receive a subsidy for 65 percent of the premium. These individuals are required to pay only 35 percent of the premium. The employer may recover the subsidy provided to assistance-eligible individuals by taking the subsidy amount as a credit on its quarterly employment tax return. The employer may provide the subsidy â" and take the credit on its employment tax return â" only after it has received the 35 percent premium payment from the individual.

It was as I said. The employer pays then, maybe, gets the funds recovered from the federal government later. It's a cost for the employer because they aren't compensated for the expense of providing the subsidy.

Um, are you insane? Firstly, there is no ban, offshore drilling started up again, second, there never was a ban on existing drilling, it was for new drilling.

There we go. I wasn't insane as you confirmed.

Except Obama didn't do that. The EPA did.

EPA is directed by Obama. Further, it's actions are the responsibility of Obama.

the continual thumbing of the nose at law and the Constitution, frequent lying that shames prior administrations,

Other random made up shit...

Let's go over a few items. A vast number of people with authority who weren't appointed by Congress; two lightweights with blatant ideological leanings appointed to the Supreme Court; continuation of all the constitutional abominations of his predecessor such as Guantanamo prison, wire tapping without a warrant (in other words, he rene

If German law in this respect is like US law,Yes. Quoting: "Illegal activities. Income from illegal activities, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity. "

Oh, "after they have to give it back?" The convict in question didn't "give it back". The victims haven't gotten anything "back". The criminal is "paying a fine". You pay income tax on income, whether you pocket the money, pay your car payment, or pay a parking ticket. Same basis here. He collected the income without paying the tax. That fact that he also owes the money to someone else (the fine) is irrelevant.

Well, try to list a child, even a newborn baby, as a dependent on a tax form without one. Quoting IRS Pub 17,:

If your dependent does not have an SSN by the time your return is due, you may want to ask for an extension of time to file, as explained earlier under When Do I Have To File.

If you do not provide a required SSN or if you provide an incorrect SSN, your tax may be increased and any refund may be reduced.

Sorry. The IRS has gone well beyond the intent of the original SSN, and there is absolutely no way out of it unless you're going to drop completely out of the economy and live illegally and on the streets (or a shack in the Montana wilderness).

You're right, because nothing could have possibly changed since were a kid... Take a look at http://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch01.html#en_US_2010_publink1000170567

Fraud was rampant prior to that change, with some people claiming MANY kids. After the new rule went into effect, approximately nine MILLION children disappeared. Funny how you didn't see any pictures on the milk cartons...

>>>may be claimed as tax deductions

My parents claimed ME and my two nieces on tax returns, and we didn't get SSNs until we were 16 (i.e. when we started working). So your claim is false.

You're right, because nothing could have possibly changed since were a kid... Take a look at http://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch01.html#en_US_2010_publink1000170567 Specifically:

Dependent's social security number. You must provide the SSN of each dependent you claim, regardless of the dependent's age. This requirement applies to all dependents (not just your children) claimed on your tax return.

I don't know how it stands legally in the US, but lots of places I've seen have signs saying it's company policy to ask for ID when you make a credit card purchase. I've been asked to show my ID once, ever, for a credit card purchase (oddly, at a place I frequent regularly, and the cashier more than likely knew me by sight). It's just too much of a hassle to check it for every customer that comes through, I suppose.

I do get asked for ID when I buy things with checks—although the only time I write checks is out of my health savings account for prescription drugs, so there may be something else going on there.

Exactly. Options mean that he can buy n shares for $m per share. If the current share price is greater than $m, then the options are worth $n*m. He doesn't pay tax on the shares unless he sells them. He can exchange them for other shares, including diversified funds that are very low risk. There are also other tricks possible, like taking out a loan (doesn't count as income) with some shares as collateral, not repaying the loan, and having the shares seized by the lender - effectively, he's sold the shares, but the whole thing is actually written off as a loss and so can be used to offset even more tax...

Not so easy.

If the lender writes off the loan, then the amount of the loan written off becomes income.

See: irs.gov

Hopefully you don't have any foreign bank accounts then, since the penalties for not doing so are quite harsh.

here you go: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040sb.pdf

"""
You must complete this part if you (a) had over $1,500 of taxable interest or ordinary dividends; (b) had a
foreign account; or (c) received a distribution from, or were a grantor of, or a transferor to, a foreign trust.
"""

Please note item (b) and the lack of income being relevant.

They're people who did their taxes wrong and really only owed that much, or who are bankrupt and the IRS got their last $3K.

The IRS will cut a deal, but not if you can pay.

While I am all for businesses making a profit, I am NOT all for a multi-billion dollar company paying effectively 2.4% while I continue to pay nearly 30% of my income.

The inequitable taxation also unfairly hits small businesses. They're unable to offshore their finances, and they end up bearing the brunt of the public's anger at multi-billion dollar companies evading taxes. Consequently in the U.S., small businesses pay some of the highest tax rates among OECD nations. The business taxes passed to assuage people upset at big corporations evading taxes, are instead helping big corporations by crippling the small businesses who could otherwise challenge their domination.

After a lot of thought, I actually reached the opposite conclusion as you. One of the core objections leading to the U.S. Revolutionary war was "No taxation without representation." That's a principle I think most people would still agree makes sense. And since I believe corporations should have no influence on government, I can't simultaneously justify to myself wanting to tax them.

The argument "Well, that gets turned into research and good pay for employees" still doesn't float IMO, when you have the higher executives of Google being paid millions. Reduce the salaries of those PHBs down to something reasonable, pay the rank and file programmers and researchers that money, and pay taxes like everyone else.

Sure it floats. All you have to do is raise the tax rate on the folks paid millions. I don't think this problem is as large as most people think it is though. If you pour over the IRS tax statistics, you'll find that the vast bulk of the income base (in the U.S. at least) is the upper-middle class and lower-upper class, roughly $75k-$250k/yr. What they lack in income, they make up for in population.

The area where it gets tricky is perks paid for by the business but which the individual doesn't report as an income-equivalent benefit. e.g. a CEO flies around in a corporate jet, but doesn't report the added expense of operating the private plane over a coach ticket as a taxable benefit.

" it must either provide a means for you to do so or reimburse"

Nope. An employer can require that you have, and use, a cell phone as a condition of employment. That's one reason there's an "Unreimbursed Employee Business Expenses" deduction available. If you feel that they must reimburse you - let them know by finding a new job.

Much like the SSL cert ecosystem today provides a means of merchant identification, without there either being a single point of failure or sinister government control.

Actually, as it's currently implemented, the SSL cert ecosystem today provides many points of failure and sinister government control that compromise the whole system. Count the number of "trusted" root CAs in your web browser -- any one of them can be evil, compromised by crackers, or agree to government intrusion in order to compromise any your web-based communications. Here's a more in-depth analysis of the problem. Even worse, these "trusted" roots can create subordinate CAs, which can in turn compromise all of your X.509-secured communications. You might also be interested in the EFF's SSL Observatory, along with their analysis of the abysmal state of today's X.509 certificate infrastructure.

To solve this properly, we'll probably need to do at least the following:

• enable multiple paths of certification for any certificate -- X.509 only allows one issuer per certificate (OpenPGP allows an arbitrary number).
• provide tools to let users indicate scoped reliance on certifying authorities. For example, you might be fine with using the US Government's certifying authority to identify https://www.irs.gov/ (note: the IRS currently uses akamai's CDN, so TLS is entirely broken for it). But you might not want to accept their certifications for https://slashdot.org/ (note: slashdot doesn't currently use TLS properly site-wide either, even though it should) or any other site that is frequently critical of the US government.

I agree that we need work on distributed trust infrastructure. That's why i contribute to the monkeysphere project -- we're pushing OpenPGP-style multi-party, user-centric certification into SSH, the web, and everywhere else we can.

I'm just not convinced that the US Government is likely do this the right way. It seems probable that they'll be happy with centrally-controlled, single-trust-path certification. Or that they'll botch it in the same way that X.509 is currently botched.

" R&D is about 10% of the amount made on the sale of drugs. "

False.

"The marketing of drugs can be upwards of 50% sometimes more "
not on new drugs. older drugs that aren't patents see 50% of their total costs in marketing. That's because the cost of manufacturing has dropped for the drug, and the RnD costs have been depreciated. It's harder to make money froma drug with an expired patent, that's why they have a larger push.

They money the companies get from the government, for the vast large part, is so they will produce drugs they make little to know money producing, like vaccines.

The RnD for Drugs and the RnD for 'tech' is vastly different. It's far FAR more expensive for drug companies. The exception being that medical devices are about the same in RnD has Drugs. When was the last time a mp3 manufacture had to have the plays go through a series of animal test? Develop a new molecule?.

And software RnD is DIRT CHEAP compared to any other RnD.

All RnD is NOT tax deductible.

Buy a clue:
http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/industries/article/0,,id=100123,00.html

You are really too simple to discuss this.

Access to information is what elevates us above cavemen. The net may be full of filth but it's also full of real information, even vital information—on geography, health, science, and even entertainment. The more time I spend in rural areas, the more I am awed by the sad paucity of information available to people who actually would like to learn about the world outside their town. Increasing numbers of critical documents are available online. Broadband affects quality of life and encourages growth of business.

Now, if you'd said "someone might not get his WoW fix, oh noes" I probably would have agreed with you.

a) tax cuts for the poor and middle classes almost always inherently include tax breaks for the wealthy

True, but there's no good reason why they have to

b) most of the poor don't end up paying tax anyway

On the contrary, the poor DO pay taxes, and lots of them. Anyone earning more than $5.00/yr pays US Income taxes. Granted, they don't pay much, but they do pay. Someone working 40 hours a week making the minimum wage of $8.50/hr earns $17,680 per year (that's only 340 dollars per week!) pays $2,136 in Federal income tax. Then there are all the myriad other taxes. State income taxes, State, county, and city sales taxes, Excise taxes on gasoline, tobacco, alcohol. The poor rent, so they don't get a mortgage deduction -- their landlords do. But they pay property taxes as part of their rent*.

Some states and localities even have sales tax on food and medicine.

*IMO property taxes are the most evil taxes of all, and should be abolished. About 20 years ago I knew an elderly couple who lost their home; it had been paid for for decades, but their retirement income didn't match the real estate market, so the taxes wound up being far more than the house payments thay'd been paying before it was paid off!

The fairest tax is a graduated income tax with no deductions. Get rid of the Capital Gains tax and tax capital gains as income, and you raise more revenue for government while making the system more fair. Why should a roofing contractor who earns $100k/yr pay twice the taxes as someone who "earns" his money gambling the stock market?

You obviously bought into the BS too. Read up on The Making Work Pay Tax Credit. There is a tax credit, but, because of the withholdings adjustment, two-income families may end up getting that bonus twice, and having to pay one of them back.

On the other hand, he did NOT raise taxes either. Though I expect the Democrats to try to raise taxes (by allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to lapse - yes, that raises taxes) during December, if they can find a way to make it look like the Republicans' fault.

I agree that Obama's policy would enact a tax increase on people in the highest tax bracket. The GOP has been threatening to raise everyone's taxes, if the richest Americans don't get theirs.

That is how the DEMs will make it look like the GOP's fault. They will push to keep the tax cuts for everyone but the rich and the GOP will have a tough choice; filibuster a tax cut, or enact a policy that benefits the middle class at the expense of the wealthy.

I'm curious if the committee recommendation, that recently advocated cutting social security, military spending, all funding for NPR and PBS, and many other items, (and coincidentally would save exactly what the Bush tax is costing us) wasn't partly motivated by the need to show people that they are going to have to choose between fiscal responsibility and the three non-negotiables in American politics (military spending, social security, and tax cuts).

People at the top easily forgot how much the country is supporting them, they live under the surreal impression that somehow they pay for everthing themselves.

Actually, they mostly do pay for it. According to the IRS's own tables of tax statistics for individuals, the top one tenth of one percent of tax returns account for over 20% of the total personal income tax revenue. The top one percent of returns account for over 40% of revenue. The bottom FIFTY PERCENT account for less than 3% of revenue. That was in 2007, and the trend is actually in the direction of getting even more skewed. Not to mention that the effective tax rate actually starts to decrease for people who make below $400k a year... so much for the "excessively taxing the middle class" hype.

Raw data here: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/07in05tr.xls

People at the top easily forgot how much the country is supporting them, they live under the surreal impression that somehow they pay for everthing themselves.

Actually, they mostly do pay for it. According to the IRS's own tables of tax statistics for individuals, the top one tenth of one percent of tax returns account for over 20% of the total personal income tax revenue. The top one percent of returns account for over 40% of revenue. The bottom FIFTY PERCENT account for less than 3% of revenue. That was in 2007, and the trend is actually in the direction of getting even more skewed. Not to mention that the effective tax rate actually starts to decrease for people who make below $400k a year... so much for the "excessively taxing the middle class" hype.

Raw data here: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/07in05tr.xls

Raising taxes? Try again. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/02corate.pdf

Regulation? Ha. Regulatory agencies are so fucking stuffed with corporate cronies it's not even funny. You got oil exes in what formerly was known as MMS (Minerals Management Service) and Wall Street guys have been fucking tearing up regulations since the 1980s.
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/why-were-bp-executives-hired-mms-fox
http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-april-15-2009/elizabeth-warren-pt--2 (eloquently explained by Elizabeth Warren)

What's wrong with regulations anyway? 'cause I really want lead paint on my cadmium drinking glasses and diethylene glycol in my toothpaste and melamine in my pet's food and my car to explode into a fireball if rear ended and my heating furnace to leak carbon monoxide and e. coli on my chicken and spinach and botulism in my can food and motor oil used in cosmetic surgery and shall I go on?

Unionization? What decade are you from?

Never mind. You're just trollin'.

While the US's tax system is incredibly screwed up and complicated, it does take $20 payments into account sanely in a few places. I believe the example for 20 bucks was repayment of lunch?

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p525.pdf page 32.

Expenses paid by another. If your personal expenses are paid for by another person, such as a corporation, the payment may be taxable to you depending upon your relationship with that person and the nature of the payment. But if that payment makes up for a loss caused by that person, and only restores you to the position you were in before the loss, the paymet is not includible in your income.

Also, if it isn't reimbursing a friend but a small payment to a friend for a service, they don't have to consider the money as income if their net earnings from self employment are less than $400 for that year.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040.pdf Page 9, Chart C, condition 5. Also, page 170 of the pdf, page SE-1, under General Instructions.

While the US's tax system is incredibly screwed up and complicated, it does take $20 payments into account sanely in a few places. I believe the example for 20 bucks was repayment of lunch?

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p525.pdf page 32.

Expenses paid by another. If your personal expenses are paid for by another person, such as a corporation, the payment may be taxable to you depending upon your relationship with that person and the nature of the payment. But if that payment makes up for a loss caused by that person, and only restores you to the position you were in before the loss, the paymet is not includible in your income.

Also, if it isn't reimbursing a friend but a small payment to a friend for a service, they don't have to consider the money as income if their net earnings from self employment are less than $400 for that year.

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040.pdf Page 9, Chart C, condition 5. Also, page 170 of the pdf, page SE-1, under General Instructions.

You missed the US Federal employer incentive to hire "visa'd" workers, over citizens. Does it really matter if the visa is H-1B, L-1, or student? 12.4% for Social Security, 2.9% for Medicare, split between employer and payroll deduction, on the first $106,800 [2009] == up to $16,340.40/employee.

Depending upon country of origin, such workers (and their employers) are NOT required to pay Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes, when the workers are from one of the 24 listed nations with administrative "Totalization Agreements".

Ref: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9187281/India_seeks_tax_deal_for_H_1B_workers
          http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/international/article/0,,id=105254,00.html
          http://www.socialsecurity.gov/international/totalization_agreements.html

If the EIC is a "social service", then so is deducting your mortgage interest. All you do to get the EIC is fill out the appropriate IRS form and send it in with your return, same as any other deduction or credit. There is simply no substantive difference between it (and the Additional Child Credit, the Making Work Pay Credit, and other "payments") and any other tax credit, other than that those other credits have an arbitrary cutoff of reducing your tax burden to zero. Sure, you could define any tax credit which results in a net payment as a "social service", but then the assertion becomes merely a tautology -- and one which conflicts with the language used in the tax code itself.

As for the FHC, your information is right for the 2008 version but wrong for the 2009 version. "For home purchased in 2009, the credit does not have to be paid back unless the home ceases to be the taxpayer's main residence within a three-year period following the purchase."

It can be. It really all depends on what else they decide not to take your hard-earned money for donating to.

Yeah, "it can be" - except it ISN'T. If the laws were completely different, murder *could* be legal, too. But it's not, because we don't live in alternate-reality-bizarro-world where up is down, left is right, and the ASPCA and the ACLU and a host of other non-secular charities aren't eligible for tax-deductible status, but religious organizations are.

Publication 78 from the IRS is pretty clear on what criteria qualify donations as tax-deductible, and there is even a search utility so you can make sure your organization of choice is a tax-deductible one.

The list is FAR longer and FAR more comprehensive than "churches", and in fact it absolutely does include the ASPCA, the ACLU, and battered women's shelters of any kind (since one of the qualifying organizations is "A community chest, corporation, trust, fund, or foundation, organized or created in the United States or its possessions, or under the laws of the United States, any state, the District of Columbia or any possession of the United States, and organized and operated exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, scientific, or literary purposes, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals." Hard to argue that battered womens' shelter wouldn't qualify as being "operated exclusively for charitable" purposes - I don't think there's a womens' shelter out there that would attempt to monetize their clientele, and if they did, I'd submit that it would be absolutely monstrous and inhuman to grant them any sort of 'favored' status under tax law.

So yeah, if the government allowed you a deduction only for "charity to religious organizations," then you'd have a point. Since the deduction is allowed for "charity" - full stop, the point is ridiculous.

The distinction between "donate money and we'll take less tax dollars" and "we'll take your tax dollars and donate money" is fairly small.

Only semantically. There is worlds of difference in the practice & principles implied by those two statements. One describes government encouraging voluntary charity by private individuals, which implies the free exercise of conscience by citizens. The other describes forced 'charity' by the government, put in place by a group of people who will use their fellow citizens to support goals and organizations they might not agree with or value at all. I'd say that the distinction is pretty clear, and hugely important.

It can be. It really all depends on what else they decide not to take your hard-earned money for donating to.

Yeah, "it can be" - except it ISN'T. If the laws were completely different, murder *could* be legal, too. But it's not, because we don't live in alternate-reality-bizarro-world where up is down, left is right, and the ASPCA and the ACLU and a host of other non-secular charities aren't eligible for tax-deductible status, but religious organizations are.

Publication 78 from the IRS is pretty clear on what criteria qualify donations as tax-deductible, and there is even a search utility so you can make sure your organization of choice is a tax-deductible one.

The list is FAR longer and FAR more comprehensive than "churches", and in fact it absolutely does include the ASPCA, the ACLU, and battered women's shelters of any kind (since one of the qualifying organizations is "A community chest, corporation, trust, fund, or foundation, organized or created in the United States or its possessions, or under the laws of the United States, any state, the District of Columbia or any possession of the United States, and organized and operated exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, scientific, or literary purposes, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals." Hard to argue that battered womens' shelter wouldn't qualify as being "operated exclusively for charitable" purposes - I don't think there's a womens' shelter out there that would attempt to monetize their clientele, and if they did, I'd submit that it would be absolutely monstrous and inhuman to grant them any sort of 'favored' status under tax law.

So yeah, if the government allowed you a deduction only for "charity to religious organizations," then you'd have a point. Since the deduction is allowed for "charity" - full stop, the point is ridiculous.

The distinction between "donate money and we'll take less tax dollars" and "we'll take your tax dollars and donate money" is fairly small.

Only semantically. There is worlds of difference in the practice & principles implied by those two statements. One describes government encouraging voluntary charity by private individuals, which implies the free exercise of conscience by citizens. The other describes forced 'charity' by the government, put in place by a group of people who will use their fellow citizens to support goals and organizations they might not agree with or value at all. I'd say that the distinction is pretty clear, and hugely important.

Actually, you can't discount a backlash if you snapped right back up to a 90% tax bracket. It didn't drop from 91% to 35% overnight, and it shouldn't go from 35 to 91 overnight either.

Also, you're wrong about it being 91 in 1980. The top bracket dropped in 1964 from 91 to 77 in 1964 and has never returned to that level since. Source: The IRS itself.

GP's statement was incorrect, most people only get a refund of what they paid. It's very possible to be paid by the government quite apart from welfare, though. If you were over 25, working, and still poor (and I mean, really poor), you missed out on the EITC. It's hard to actually get money back on it as an individual, but if you have 2+ kids and make less than about $30,000 it's not hard for the credit to be more than you owe in taxes, and they will cut you a check for it. As posters below have shown, that includes quite a few people.

Note that I said tax CREDITS, not refunds. I know the difference.

From the IRS website: "...some credits, such as the EITC and the child tax credit, can actually exceed your tax."

That's welfare, pure and simple.

Only poor people pay taxes.

Clearly you have never reviewed the IRS' Statistics of Income. I'll quickly fill you in. People making less than 40k per year pay less than 5% of all personal income tax. That is 57% of ALL tax files pay 5% of ALL individual income tax. If you don't believe me, look it up. Now, I realize that federal income tax is only a portion of the taxes everyone pays, but PLEASE don't keep spreading the BS that you're spreading.

IRS Statistic of Income

At no point will the IRS 'rebate' more money than was paid. A person can only take more out than they put in if they collect some form of social service.

The grandparent was apparently referring to the Earned Income Tax Credit. I don't think it's accurate to say that you get it if you are under the median income.

You can get more than you paid in individual income taxes. But, I don't believe it will be more than you paid in Social Security taxes.

EITC Home Page

Only poor people pay taxes.

That's a great sound-bite but doesn't hold up so well when we look at the actual data and dollar amount (instead of playing the tax-rate percentage game that everyone loves when it comes time to bash "the rich") we see that the top 5% of income earners paid about 600bn in taxes, which was over half of the total income tax taken in for the entire rest of the population in 2008. That's right - 5% of taxpayers contribute more in tax dollars than the combined tax payments of every other individual in the country. The top 10% pays nearly 2/3rds of all tax dollars.

The "poor people" you refer to - which we'll generously define as the half of the population who make less than the other half -- paid a total of ~28bn in 2008. Compared to 600bn paid by "the rich" and 400bn paid by those in the 50th to 95th percentile of taxpayers.

... still just under 1/3 of the U.S. national debt as of October 2009....

WRONG. That was the deficit for FY09. That means that over the fiscal year we spent over a trillion more than we took in. Someone needs to stop this. The current national debt is over $13,618,426,600,000.00 and rising at a rate of $33,000+ per second. We need to take in at least $1,080,000,000,000 more in taxes or reduced spending per year just to keep it from growing. The IRS collected $2,396,290,997,000 in FY07. That means taxes have to go up by at least 47% from that or spending has to be drastically cut (probably both) just to keep the debt from increasing. To get rid of the national debt in 13 years, taxes would have to go up by about 87%. I don't know anybody sane that wants a 70% tax bracket to be the top end. We should cut all programs to a level that is affordable, stop waste, and run a $1tn surplus until the debt is eliminated.