The Republicans continue to sing the song of how high taxes are on the wealthy and corporations. They state if the wealthy and corporations, the supposed job creators, are given even more tax cuts that somehow we will bring the budget into balance because the cut in taxes will create more tax paying jobs.
What they do not say is that this has been occurring for thirty years and absent the period where President Bush1/Clinton increased taxes appropriately did we get a bump in employment. Of course the effective middle class income & wealth has been in decline throughout that period since no president has yet completely broken from President Reagans supply side economics that have pilfered the middle class.
My Book: As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
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The Declining Effective Tax Rate Of America’s 400 Highest Earning Individuals
You often see progressives touting charts that illustrate the steep decline in the top marginal income tax rate, but it’s really not clear how to interpret that kind of information since the tax base is always changing. But ThinkProgress has looked at some newly released IRS data that lets you calculate the effective tax rate being paid by the top 400 highest earners:
At the same time, their incomes have skyrocketed:
This is only 400 people so it’s not like you can balance the budget just by soaking them, but “If the richest 400 Americans simply paid the same effective rate in 1995 as they did in 2007, the government would have collected over $3 billion in additional revenue.”
Yglesias » The Declining Effective Tax Rate Of America’s 400 Highest Earning Individuals
