And after more than a decade of tax cuts for the rich and Big Business, is America better off?
The economic importance of statutory tax rates is blown far out of proportion by Republicans looking for ways to make taxes look high when they are quite low. And they almost never note that the statutory tax rate applies only to the last dollar earned or that the effective tax rate is substantially lower even for the richest taxpayers and largest corporations because of tax exclusions, deductions, credits and the 15 percent top rate on dividends and capital gains.
If taxes are low historically and in comparison with our global competitors, how are Republicans able to maintain that taxes are excessively high?
They do so by ignoring the effective tax rate and concentrating solely on the statutory tax rate, which is often manipulated to make it appear that rates are much higher than they really are.
For example, Stephen Moore of The Wall Street Journal asserted that Democrats were trying to raise the top income tax rate to 62 percent from 35 percent.
But most of the difference between these two rates is the payroll tax and state taxes that are already in existence.
The rest consists largely of assuming tax increases that no one has formally proposed and that would be politically impossible to enact at the present time.
Ryan Chittum, in Columbia Journalism Review, responded with a commentary that called the Moore analysis “deeply disingenuous.”
Nevertheless, one routinely hears variations of the Moore argument from conservative commentators. By contrast, one almost never hears that total revenues are at their lowest level in two or three generations as a share of G.D.P. or that corporate tax revenues as a share of G.D.P. are the lowest among all major countries.
One hears only that the statutory corporate tax rate in the United States is high compared with other countries, which is true but not necessarily relevant.
The many adjustments to income permitted by the tax code, plus alternative tax rates on the largest sources of income of the wealthy, explain why the average federal income tax rate on the 400 richest people in America was 18.11 percent in 2008, according to the Internal Revenue Service, down from 26.38 percent when these data were first calculated in 1992.
Among the top 400, 7.5 percent had an average tax rate of less than 10 percent, 25 percent paid between 10 and 15 percent, and 28 percent paid between 15 and 20 percent.
The truth of the matter is that federal taxes in the United States are very low. There is no reason to believe that reducing them further will do anything to raise growth or reduce unemployment.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/20...s-high-or-low/
And after more than a decade of tax cuts for the rich and Big Business, is America better off?
lmao....troll boy keeps deleting his post and reposting so his "copycat" thread hopefully gets the attention he wants it to. you could have posted this in my thread, but oh no, you so desperately need the attention. how pathetic.
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