Posted by
Defend America on Tuesday, December 08, 2009 9:46:24 AM
About Those ‘Tax Cuts for the Rich’…
By Mark J. Perry
December 8, 2009, 6:54 am
he Tax Foundation reported last week that more than 143 million
individual income tax returns were filed in 2007, and 46.6 million of
those returns had a zero or negative tax liability, setting a new
record for the number of “non-payers.” This group represented almost
one out of every three tax returns filed in 2007 (32.6 percent, see
nearby chart), and reflects tax filers whose exemptions, deductions,
and credits wiped out any federal income taxes that would have been
due. According to the Tax Foundation, every dollar withheld from the
paychecks of the “non-payers” during the year was refunded, and in
about half of the cases, substantial additional money was refunded to
the tax filer. There were an additional 15 million people in 2007 who
did not earn enough income to file a tax return, bringing the total
number of Americans who paid no federal income taxes to more than 61
million, or 39 percent of the tax-eligible population (158 million
including filers plus non-filers).
Tax Foundation economist Scott Hodge reports that “the percentage of
tax returns with no liability was fairly low in the 1960s (only 16
percent in 1969) and again in the early 1980s (17.9 percent in 1984). A
record had been set every year since 2002, as tax cuts throughout the
Bush years, especially the refundable child tax credit, pushed
low-to-middle income people off the tax rolls.”
Perry finishes by saying:
Bottom Line: Taken together, the data in these graphs
challenge the rhetoric that the Bush tax cuts were “tax cuts for the
rich,” by showing first that there were more Americans, both in total
numbers and as a share of the total, who paid no tax after the Bush tax
cuts than before. One could even argue that the Bush tax cuts of 2001
and 2003 were actually huge “tax cuts for the poor and middle class”
because they helped to increase the number of “non-payers” by more than
14 million Americans between 2000 and 2007. Secondly, the tax burden on
“the rich”—the top 1 percent of taxpayers—reached a record high in 2007
of more than 40 percent, and was higher after the Bush tax cuts than
before.
http://blog.american.com/?p=7951