"The top-earning 25 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $62,068) earned
67.5 percent of the nation's income, but they paid more than four out of every five dollars collected by the federal income tax (86 percent). The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $364,657) earned approximately 21.2 percent of the nation's income (as defined by AGI), yet paid 39.4 percent of all federal income taxes. That means the top
1 percent of tax returns paid about the same amount of federal individual income taxes as the bottom 95 percent of tax returns."
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It's also worth noting that corporate tax receipts have more than doubled in the last few years, exceeding $300billion.
I believe Lysander already said this but it is worth repeating:
"the share of total income taxes paid by the wealthy has risen even as statutory tax rates have fallen sharply. A growing body of international data shows the same trend."
Someone suggested sumthin' about weathermen predicting rain but I could never figger out how the ave. mean was less important than the median in that example.
OK, smarty pants, _you_ try to keep the Randroid on topic.
Whenever I say anything about ave. mean income he calls me a smelly pinko Maoist Marxist Stalinist.
Which the OP has so far steadfastly refused to reveal. The only distribution from Nature that has been discussed in this thread so far is rainfall frequency, which the OP rejected as not the one that he had in mind.
"Does free speech precede each and every free trade?"
That way everyone can watch them cut 'n run and know they are nothing but cowardly frauds.
No muss no fuss.
Bret Cahill
"If monied interests pay outspoken market economists to dodge questions fundamental to markets, next thing you know, you have a lot of market economists dodging issues fundamental to markets."
You know, snipping the discussion of more meaningful statistics that I would use doesn't prevent anyone from looking at the previous message and seeing that this is a bald-faced lie.
Right, which is why I'd look at the other forecasts, not the mean time until the next rain.
Corn. That doesn't make the mean time until next rain more important than the median time to next rain.
We have discussed this horseshit from John before. And, believe me, it is horseshit. The most important point to be made here is that of the deficits, and the fact that the economy did very well after the Democratic tax hikes of 1990 and then 1993. Whether the rich paid more taxes or not is totally irrelevant. The middle class paid more taxes because they had a lot more income from having decent jobs. The big boys paid less because they had more income from capital gains as opposed to ordinary income and those capital gains were from actually INVESTING in the economy as opposed to sucking on straight economic rent.
What evidence, moron? The payment of taxes by the rich is NOT the objective of tax policy when that policy is being managed by intelligent beings.
What a Republican apologist. We've been through this one too. The reduced military spending started in 1990 due to Democratic control of the budget. The Repukes didn't get back into power until 1995. And the defeat of "Hillary Care" was a nothing as regards the general economy. The gains came from a tax code that encouraged actual investment as opposed to economic rent collection. But that sort of reality does no good in politics because people do not understand what economic rent is. It is much more important to say the things Bret says because he is talking in a language that Joe Sixpack has a shot at understanding in the short frame. You and the Republicans lose any time the reality can be brought to light. But it gets technical and when that happens the voter's eyes just sort of gloss over.
This is the lie that will not die. It was the "We get to lie about our earnings" bubble as opposed to the "dot.com" bubble.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!
Military spending has NOTHING to do with the war on terror other than pissing off the terrrrrrrrrrrists and making more of em.
We see that the income inequality started increasing just as soon as the Republican thieves came to town. And when you get more income you pay more taxes. Meanwhile the income of the middle class took it in the ass. And let us also look at the unemployment numbers for this wonderful period of rich man tax soaking:
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It is not surprising that the unemployed pay less taxes. In all fairness this unemployment was not caused by Reagan but by Paul Volcker. Nonetheless the complex dishonesty of the righties shines through. By focusing on taxes paid they distort the economic realities.
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-- On the first point, in 1980, when the top statutory income tax rate went up to 70 percent, the share of income taxes paid by the top 1 percent of taxpayers was just 19.3 percent. After Ronald Reagan's tax cut of 1981, which reduced the top rate to 50 percent -- a massive give-away to the wealthy according to those on the left-- the percentage of income taxes paid by the top 1 percent rose steadily.
What is not said is that the cut was only for unearned income OTHER THAN CAPITAL GAINS. Wages were already maxed at 50% on income over what would now be $600k.
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1986, the top 1 percent's share of all federal income taxes rose to
25.7 percent. That year, the top statutory tax rate was further cut to 28 percent -- another huge-give-away, we were told. Yet the share of income taxes paid by the top 1 percent continued to rise. By 1992, it was up to
27.5 percent.
Notice how these people fail to mention that tax INCREASES of 1986 and
1990 on the way to this claim of 1992.
So as the economy cratered in 1980 - 1984 the rich still had plenty of income from bonds while the middle class was unemployed. Wages NEVER recovered from the Paul Volcker recession. The bullshit artists are very very good at cherry picking economic data. Looking at ALL the data explains why the rich SEEMED to be paying more of their income in taxes while the middle really were paying more of their income in taxes. Percentage of total tax revenue is a farcical statistic that carries no actual economic meaning; especially when you run the economy using a credit card. Ask yourself who buys bonds and T-Bills and who owes who. You can bet yer ass that unemployed people were not buying those 20% yield bonds that had to be sold because of deficits in the 80's. And the people that now hold 2 jobs to make ends meet in the Bush economy aren't buying any T-Bills either. In the Republican economy the rich don't pay their taxes. They lend money to the government instead. And your kids will be paying their kids forever.
No one expects that. But it would be ideal if you knew what you were talking about when you claimed the existence of such a distribution. If you don't know what that one distribution is, what is your evidence that there is such a distribution.
Your humility in that regard is well founded.
Or, more accurately, no one has ever made such a case that you understood and accepted.
But everyone expects you to stick to the issue, namely, what distributions in Nature have an average mean which ain't important and a median that _is_ important.
So far, the only distribution with that unique status is income distribution.
Nope. To have that status, income distribution would have to be an element of Nature, which it isn't--it is purely a man-made phenomenon--and the mean would have to be unimportant rather than just uninteresting. Why do you think that the mean is unimportant?
BTW, I thought of one other type of distribution, actually in Nature, for which people almost always refer to the median instead of the mean (although in this instance, they have exactly the same informational content). One almost always talks of the median time for atoms of a radioactive isotope to exist before they decay. The mean (which is
You claim that there is no energy crisis because we will develop new technologies. You also claim that the development of new technologies is driven by free markets and private enterprise. The second claim is not borne out by the facts. Private investors do not like blue sky research.
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