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DEL.ICIO.USThe topic of the day for conservatives: The “2% illusion”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal is churning through right-handed web sites today, and providing much fodder for talk radio:
A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue.
That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.
Comments
By GA Values
February 26, 2009 3:05 PM | Link to this
I feel sorry for those poor people making a half-million dollars a year. The rest of us need to tighten our belts so they don’t have to pay any more.
By Bentley
February 26, 2009 3:22 PM | Link to this
It may be making the rounds of the right-handed, but even more interesting is the left-handed acting like it doesn’t even exist.
Here is a surprise for GA Values (above) who attempts sarcasm. If the Feds take 40% and the states take 6-11%, that means that these people, who already pay 70% of all taxes only get to keep 50 cents out of every dollar they earn while the bottom half of all wage earning household pay nothing in taxes.
It is a question of policy and fairness. In a democracy, everyone should pay something. And, any politician who riles the majority to beat-up a minority is unworthy of the office they hold. Obama is just another whack-job who picks victims and riles the masses. That is how pure evil works.
By T
February 26, 2009 5:38 PM | Link to this
What that Journal piece conveniently forgets is money raised by higher corporate taxes along with the various other ways (payroll, gas, capital gains and other taxes) government is funded.
Individual income tax isn’t the only way this new spending will be funded. Nice try though.
By Fred
February 27, 2009 4:52 PM | Link to this
The article is misleading with its numbers. In its “let’s go all the way” paragraph, he goes from analyzing the numbers from those making over 200,000 or 388,806 to 500,000. He doesn’t state what % of the population makes over 500,000. And he states that taxing their every dime just results in 1.3 trillion “extra”, not 1.3 trillion. Finally, he then launches to comparing that to 4 trillion. I’m tired of people on both sides making straw man arguments and distorting facts in their rhetoric. Too much to hope for, but I wish we could just get a fair analysis and numbers once in a while.