johnbyronkuhner.com

This is painfully obvious, but I see and hear the Republican talking points in many places in our society about how high a percentage of the taxes the rich have to pay.  The car mechanic in my town has a sign about how unfair it is that the top 20% pay more than 80% of the taxes.  I’ve heard the same on Facebook, and it’s all over talk radio of course.  The most pure statement of it is in a Heritage Foundation brief:

Since the passage of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, critics have claimed incessantly that they disproportionately benefited the rich while burdening the poor. Now that the data is in, these claims have been shown to be unquestionably false.

Squeezing the Wealthy Even More

According to a report issued by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the tax cuts significantly increased the share of federal income taxes paid by the highest-earning 20 percent of households compared to their levels in 2000, President Clinton’s final year in office.

In 2006, the latest available year from CBO, the top 20 percent of income earners paid 86.3 percent of all federal income taxes, an all-time high.This is an increase of over 6 percent from 2000, when the top 20 percent paid 81.2 percent. During the same period, the bottom four quintiles all saw their share of the federal income tax burden fall sharply.

The intellectual dishonesty here is actually quite astonishing to a naif like me, who imagine that a thinktank with big funding and name recognition must have certain standards.  The percentage of taxes the wealthy pay has gone up consistently because the total share of the country’s wealth those wealthy people own is also at record levels. The latest data indicates that the top twenty percent own just shy of 88% of the country’s wealth, and are complaining that they pay 86% of the taxes.  In other words, the tax system is regressive: the bottom 80%, who own 12% of the country’s wealth, have to pay 14% of the taxes, simply because they do not have the same kind of influence the rich have.

Given the current numbers, the situation will get worse.  The rich become richer because their sizable incomes mean that they can accumulate wealth, whereas poor people have to spend almost everything they earn and accumulate very slowly if at all.  Currently, given our tax structure, the rich, by government policy, have more capacity to accumulate wealth and consolidate their social position, because of their disproportionately low share of the taxes.  This is why the country now has less social mobility – once considered a hallmark of American culture – than most other developed countries.