The Patriot Post® · Tips for Income Redistribution Day
It’s that time of year again. Hard-working Americans are reminded just how big a bite Uncle Sam takes out of their paychecks. The government acts like it’s doing the public a favor by giving back some of the money people overpaid in taxes during the year. And statists grouse about how the rich and corporations are gaming the tax system and not paying their fair share.
Happy Income Redistribution Day!
Thanks to the Demo-gogues, the false narrative that the rich don’t pay their fair share is engrained into the American psyche. Leftists have been pushing this myth for many years in an effort to justify even higher taxes on upper-income earners and corporations to pay for entitlement programs that buy votes.
The next time you hear someone rant about the rich not paying their fair share, throw some facts at them.
Every year, the Tax Foundation releases its Facts and Figures report, a collection of state and federal tax data that compares tax rates across the country and breaks down just how much people are actually paying in taxes. The most updated information covers the 2015 tax year.
The top 1% of taxpayers earned 21% of all adjusted gross income in 2015, and paid 39% of all income taxes. Their average tax rate was 27.1%, almost twice the rate for all taxpayers nationwide. This group of 1.4 million people is carrying a big chunk of the tax burden for the 141 million taxpayers nationwide.
Looking further down, the top 10% paid 71% of all income taxes, and the top 50% paid 97% of all income taxes. The bottom 50% of taxpayers earned 11.3% of all income, but paid only 2.8% of the taxes. Fair share, indeed.
Leftists don’t seek fairness in the tax system, though. That’s just a phrase that fits nicely on a bumper sticker, to be rolled out whenever the issue of tax cuts arises. Democrats operate under the assumption that all the money belongs to the government. That is what they are saying when they use terms like “tax rebate” or phrases like “the government cannot afford tax cuts.”
It is this same backwards mentality that helped spark the American Revolution in the first place. Democrats might want to refresh their memory of history. Otherwise, they’re doomed to remain on the wrong side of it.
The debate over last year’s tax cuts saw leftists pull out all the stops in their perpetual class war. They claimed that the money didn’t exist to pay for the cuts and that the government has a revenue problem. In real life, the government has a spending problem, but that didn’t stop the media from spreading Nancy Pelosi’s message that the tax cuts would lead to the end of the world.
When it became obvious that middle-income earners were going to enjoy $1,000 bonuses, millionaire Pelosi shrugged off the bonuses as “crumbs.” When more than 200 American companies announced salary increases, new hiring and major expansions thanks directly to the tax cuts, Democrats called the changes insignificant — and they looked foolish doing it.
This is the last year that people will be filing their taxes under the Obama rates. That means we have yet to see the full impact of the tax cuts on the economy. But the new individual and corporate rates are already having a positive effect, which is bad news for “progressives.” Like a virus, they only seem to prosper when things are going badly.
What a pleasure it is to see them disappointed.