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It's lots of fun to criticize those nasty Republicans for blocking this bill. We can all call them names and blame them entirely for the mess and feel really good about ourselves in the process. But I approach this from a different perspective. As one of the ever-shrinking group of people who pay the freight for these wonderful government programs I thought I would share a few numbers with this forum. When we talk about $800B, how much is that really? Well, take a gander at the following statistics:

- there are 138 million taxpayers in the US
- the top 10% of earners pay 71% of the taxes
- the income cutoff for the top 10% is $109K

So, doing some simple math I compute that those top 10% (roughly 14 million taxpayers) are responsible for $800,000,000,000 times 0.71, or about $40,000 each. Think about that. Someone who makes $109,000 per year is going to have to come up with another $40,000 in taxes. Also remember that many people file jointly, so that $109,000 is really more like a married couple, both of whom work, each making $54,000. Now how many slashdot posters are we talking about here? I would wager there are quite a large number of posters on this board in that top 10%. How many of you have $40,000 laying around that you are willing to give to the government to build schools in another state, or to give broadband to people in the boonies, or the myriad other "critical programs" that need your hard-earned money?

The numbers in this post are for the 2006 tax year and were obtained from http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6

What the left ISN'T answering is the question of "who bears teh burden for paying the taxes and paying off the debt...". The answer may surprise you: the rich do.

As far as personal income tax goes, the top 1% of income earners, the very rich, paid nearly 40% of all the income tax collected in 2006, whereas the bottom 50% (making less than $32,000 annually) paid only 3%. I believe the current threshold for paying no taxes is the bottom 38%. The top 25%, who made $64,702 or more, paid 86% of the income tax collected. In short, the people who are going to pay for all of the debt incurred will be the rich, unless things change dramatically.

But how much of what the government takes in comes from the tax payer? According to Wikipedia, $1.25 trillion dollars of the total $2.66 trillion came from income taxes. Another $927.2 billion came from Social Security and other payroll taxes, which we could split half and half between people and their employer. People also paid the $25.7 billion in estate and gift taxes. Corporations paid only $314.9 billion. Taxes on the people, then, would make up 65% of the federal budget. So when those debts come due, the people are going to pay for it. But since the lower 75% of all tax payers make up 13.7% of all taxes paid, they won't see the big hit -- the rich will.

The left can certainly see what the government can do when given tons of money and power, as based on the current approval ratings of Congress and the President, almost no one is happy about their actions. So why would they insist on giving the government more of our money and more power when they can't be responsible with what they already take? If you want them to be more responsible (or you want to take away some of their power to wage those wars and drive up the debt) vote for lower taxes and less spending.

As long as the tax rate is less than 100% on the additional income, there is still incentive to earn more.

You should not ignore the costs of working. For a family with children, moving both parents into working means paying for child care. Working generally involves a commuting cost and sometimes a clothing cost. A slight change in income and payroll taxes may cause a large number of people to leave the workforce.

The progressive tax system is necessary regardless of the effect it has on motivation, but because there are social costs that has to be paid. Costs which can not and are not internalized by market forces.

Of course, you assume that government has the ability to effect externalities. Sometimes it does. Often it does not. And when it fails to address externalities, even if well-intentioned, it may end up costing society more than the externalities it sought and failed to solve (one word: Iraq).

Taxation itself has a deadweight loss to the economy. Thus you should be careful before you tax, since you are inherently costing society in the process of taxing. What you do with the tax should have a proven ability to provide a return to society greater than its deadweight loss.

A better argument for progressive taxes is because "that's where the money is." In 2006, the top 50% of US income earners paid 97% of income tax dollars, and the top 1% of income earners paid 40% of all income tax dollars.

Quite simply it is the wya they choose to work, they assumed no one would really question it (IMHO).

To provide you with a firm quote for a given zip code, they'd have to either allow customer support/sales people access to the real billing engine, or maintain a seperate parallel system that shares the same calculation engine used for production billing. If they were to do that, all they can really answer is what the phone would cost if you were billed *today*, not what it will be in thirty days, when you get your first bill.

At issue is the fact that the carriers pass-thru the taxes and fees our government imposes on them, even when the Gov't tries to force them not to (the carriers don't want to appear greedy when the Gov't raises taxes, they want the Gov't to appear greedy).

I think it would be fair for the carriers to be able to provide sample tax rates for various plans, but with the caveat that an individual's taxes may be more or less, based on their circumstance, location, etc. In that case, what is the real value? Seems to me the original caller could calculate the taxes fairly well by taking his current bill, caling the carrier nad having them explain how each tax is calculated, set fees would remain the same, proportional fees increase as the cost of the service increases.

Is it just me, or are many slashdot postings from a bunch of whiners? Why hound the poor salse person at the kiosk in the mall, if it is important to you, and they can't answer your question move on - you seem to be trying to trick them into an answer when they clearly have none to give.

How Michael Moore of you...

You are either willfully lying or just plain ignorant.

Yea, I think you read that right, the bottom half of all "income tax payers". We too have groups of people that pay no tax. We also end up with people who not only pay no tax, but get a refund of more tax then they might have paid. The term bottom half refers to income levels, not how much was paid.

The bottom half or the bottom 50% of tax payers is generally all income under $30,000 per year. They generally pay less then 5% of of all taxes collected and in 2005, accounted for less then 3.07%.

The top 5% of tax payers, which include incomes of $150,000 or more paid almost 60% (59.67) of all taxes in the same year.

And this is the adjusted gross income which means after all their deductions. $30,000 could easily be 40 g a year or more depending on how they file and what they are taking in deductions. These were round numbers. More accurate ones can be found here. The bottom half is typically 15-20% of all people 15 or older who earn income. The top 5% is roughly 3-10% of all the same.

The GP was right, America is paid for by cooperations and the wealthy. The size of the payouts are disproportionately tilted to a small portion of the population and companies.

Well our system is far from utopian, but it's the best we got, and it's better to work with the current system then work on something that couldn't be used unless there were significant changes in hows things worked.

If by "work on something we got" you mean to retain the ever-expanding influence of mega-corporate wealth at the expense of citizenry (not to mention the fact that a handful of the same mega-corporations and mega-wealthy individuals own all of the media and thus control the democratic debate) then you might as well give up the pretense and simply accept Fascism as inevietable.

Still doesn't correlate for me when it comes to the numbers, they still go up despite tax cuts in the largest bracket.

That is because those GDP and the "real" compensation charts are really useless. GDP is accurate but represents merely the growth of the population. Note that it grows no matter what and the only irregular acceleration centered on 1945 when the WWII forced massive government-financed production increases of war materiel. The "real" compensation chart is meaningless since it is not indicating whose compensation it measures. If billionaires got richer much faster then workers (which is the actual case) the "real" compensation measured as the average would climb madly. Yet contrary to that chart we know that the compensation in middle class and lower levels has stagnated for close to a decade now.

For taxation levels, see this then correlate it to this.

Minimum wage earners don't have tax shelters because they don't have any tax liability to shelter their income from. Not that they don't give the government an interest free loan in terms of tax withholding and then waiting for that rebate (which some call 'free money' funny enough.)

Ironically, 50% of the wage earners in the US pay 97% of the taxes. And the top 3% pay over half the income taxes in the US. Learn more here.

Actually, they don't, but since they receive that proportion of the benefit of a civilized society, they should.
http://www.ntu.org/main/page.php?PageID=6

the Democrats wouldn't have invaded Iraq?

John Kerry would have.

Or lowered taxes for the rich...

The poor don't pay income taxes, pretty much, as a rule. The top 25% of taxpayers pay 83% of the taxes. How do you lower taxes on people who don't pay any taxes, or, in the case of people who get child credits and the EITC, get government subsidies?

or reduced our civil liberties...

Name five you've lost.

or alienated our allies...

Coalition to fight in Iraq included more countries this time than in '91. France and Germany had reasons to support Saddam's regime, namely, they were profiting from the oil-for-food fiasco. While that hasn't been thoroughly investigated yet, it's not going to be a pretty picture for our European "allies."

or wish to take away women's rights...

Again, name five.

or had a term with negative job growth.

And how many of the past presidents were in the midst of a recession when a major act of terrorism struck?

The job losses were a continuing effect of the dot-com bubble, which burst in spring 2000, as well as some bad fiscal policy from the Fed in preparation for Y2K. If you think it's President Bush's fault that people lost jobs, I have some Flooz I'm looking to sell.

I saw a quote in an AP article yesterday, I think, that was from an unemployed guy supporting Kerry, because he thought Kerry was going to create jobs. If you actually think politicians create jobs, there's a reason you're unemployed -- you're stupid. Yes, the Republicans spout the same rhetoric, but it's fiction. If you don't know that, keep drinking the Kool-Aid, my friend. You sir, are the perfect Democrat voter.

You do realize that the top 5%, income wise, pay over 50% of all federal taxes (stats). Looking at current estaminets it looks like that under the Bush tax cut program that the tax cut have actually increased the percentage that the top 5% pays, not lessened it.

Also you do realize that, say 120k for the cut line of 5%, that 2,000 back equates to 1.6% of their income and for folks in the bottom 50% who I believe are getting 200-ish back that it equates to 6.7 % or so (assuming 30k cut line).

Show me some real statistics

I'll show you mine... now you can show us all yours. Just gots to love Google for hunting this stuff down.

Who pays the piper?
Who pays income taxes?
Income Tax: Who Pays? IRS Figures for 2000

What I still don't get is why folks are so hot on upping tax rate on the very folks that are capable of hiring employees? Isn't the whole point in getting a sagging economy turned around to get the unemployment numbers down? Last I checked, social programs don't hire people.

Well, there are many websites that vigorously claim that the email tax is a number one hoax....

So it must be true then.

Right?
RIGHT!

Uh Oh.

That was this summer 2003, Sen. Mark Dayton's idea to fight Spam...

Pfew, that was a close call: Senator Downplays E-Mail Tax Idea, Thursday, May 22, 2003.

If they tax email, then the spammers have won.

Now, if 'they' find this posting, they'll probably come up with a tax on hyperlinks...

But will anybody think of the children?

Definitely not working mans wages. Interesting comment. What do you mean by that? Only people who do low-wage jobs are "working men"? Only people who earn low amounts should be felt sorry for? I have a feeling you mean that anybody in the 50% bracket is so "lucky" that they deserve to be soaked with taxes. Of course, this would require that corporations start pulling their weight and be subject to this as well. Except corporations don't pay tax. They just raise prices, or lower wages. So their customers or employees pay the tax. Every cost that a business has is reflected in the price of their products. Taxes, labor, fuel costs, etc. So basically all your saying by the statement "corporations should pull their weight" is that we the people should pay taxes, just hidden from us, so we don't complain about it to the government See this paper for some examples. I'm all for your argument for a flat tax however. And the EIC is a fraud where people think they are paying taxes, but actually get a welfare payment. Just be careful with the class warfare rhetoric.

Actually I agree with you, I voted for Bush. I have written letters to my congress people, I live in the Socalist Republic of California so it doesn't matter, but I am active. I donate to the National Taxpayers Union, and was a registered Libertarian until I decided to go independant. I consider myself moderately politically active, and reasonably well informed. My problem with the US is that the system IMHO is fundamentally broken in that Congress has too much power. From what I can tell the founding fathers were much more concerned that there would never be a "king" than they were with career politicians that choose to ignore the constitution when it gets in their way. Both donkeys and elephants are guilty of this equally and in my view congress should be evicted and replaced with people who care about this country and not about getting re-elected. One two year term would be fine with me, and dont give me that crap about nothing getting done, how about this, dont take 15 breaks a year and see how much you get done.

I agree with you about Florida, all of the whiners that can't accept that Bush won the state are flat out wrong and always will be, the numbers are there now and you can't argue with that.

Call me many things, but dont call me un-informed or not involved, because I am both. We live in a broked society, unfortuneately there is no fix, that's why duct tape was invented.

If you are interested in the truth on this scam, read National Taxpayers Union Foundation Policy Paper 115.