Who's taxed enough, already?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guns Guns Guns
  • Start date Start date
G

Guns Guns Guns

Guest


Federal income taxes on middle-income families have declined significantly in recent decades.




  • Income taxes: A family of four in the exact middle of the income spectrum will pay only 4.7 percent of its income in federal income taxes this year, according to a new analysis by the Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center.




  • This is the third-lowest percentage in the past 50 years, after 2008 and 2009.




  • Overall federal taxes: Middle-income households are paying overall federal taxes — which include income as well as payroll and excise taxes — at or near their lowest levels in decades, according to the latest data from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).






  • Households in the middle fifth of the income spectrum paid an average of 14.3 percent of their income in overall federal taxes in 2007, the latest year for which data are available, according to CBO. This is just slightly above this group’s effective tax rate of 13.8 percent in 2003, which was the lowest level since at least 1979.







  • Most Americans pay more in payroll taxes, which support Social Security and Medicare, than they do in income taxes. Thus, the 14.3 percent figure reflects the impact of payroll taxes far more than income taxes.







mad%20tea%20party_700.jpg








http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=3151
 
burtless_disposable_income_graph.png
[/FONT]








Key Recovery Act tax credits include:




  • The American Opportunity Tax Credit, which gives students and families up to $2,500 in tax savings to help pay for college tuition and other expenses. The AOTC and other tuition benefits have helped more than 12.5 million students and their families pay for college, an increase in tax benefits for higher education of more than 90 percent from the year before.
  • The Earned Income Tax Credit, which helps moderate-income working families make ends meet. The Recovery Act increased the credit for families with three or more children, bringing the maximum amount to $5,657.
  • The Child Tax Credit, which helps low-and moderate-income families with children. More families are benefitting from the child tax credit under the Recovery Act, which reduced the minimum amount of earned income used to calculate the additional child tax credit to $3,000 from $12,550.
  • COBRA and Unemployment Benefits: For those who lost their jobs in the recession, to help them get back on their feet, the Recovery Act provided a 65 percent tax credit to help cover the cost of health care and made the first $2,400 in unemployment benefits tax-free, when normally 100 percent of those benefits are taxable.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/21/tax-cut-facts-how-obama-s-tax-cuts-are-helping-american-families
 
Back
Top