Alicia's rambling about reading, football, life, and whatever other shiny things come into view.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Tax Day Follow Up
My Tax Day post garnered a great comment from Becca...check it out! I thought this cartoon from Paul Krugman's blog sums up a lot of the contradictions Tea Partiers are spouting.
While I don't "enjoy" paying taxes, I also don't have a problem with it as I understand the civic consequences of doing so or not.
But for further talking points when you run into crazies, the number of people that don't pay taxes is NOT 40+%. It isn't even close. Federal taxes are paid in 3 different catagories, income, FICA, and Social Security, check your paystub. The tax filing on April 15th is ONLY for your income taxes. 40-ish percent of people may not be paying income tax which is our only progressive tax policy. But they are still paying FICA nad social security which has no deduction or credits. So even once you factor in the number of refundable cradits, the actual percent of Americans paying no federal tax is ONLY 13% which seems to be a pretty reasonable figure to me.
Furthermore, that doesn't account for your state and city taxes which are recouped in various forms of income tax, sales tax, property tax etc. So when it comes right down to it, pretty much every person (legal resident or not) is paying taxes in this country. Well, except maybe for freegan squatters living in a hollowed out tree in an Orgeon forest on federal land, which is actually illegal anyway.
1 comment:
While I don't "enjoy" paying taxes, I also don't have a problem with it as I understand the civic consequences of doing so or not.
But for further talking points when you run into crazies, the number of people that don't pay taxes is NOT 40+%. It isn't even close. Federal taxes are paid in 3 different catagories, income, FICA, and Social Security, check your paystub. The tax filing on April 15th is ONLY for your income taxes. 40-ish percent of people may not be paying income tax which is our only progressive tax policy. But they are still paying FICA nad social security which has no deduction or credits. So even once you factor in the number of refundable cradits, the actual percent of Americans paying no federal tax is ONLY 13% which seems to be a pretty reasonable figure to me.
Furthermore, that doesn't account for your state and city taxes which are recouped in various forms of income tax, sales tax, property tax etc. So when it comes right down to it, pretty much every person (legal resident or not) is paying taxes in this country. Well, except maybe for freegan squatters living in a hollowed out tree in an Orgeon forest on federal land, which is actually illegal anyway.
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