Liberal Bizarro World Bait and Switch Tax Math

Just when I thought the headline "Payroll tax cuts rob the poor to feed the rich" meant that I was going to read a fine story by a liberal lamenting how the richest Americans, everyone making about $106,800 a year and "to infinity and beyond," don't pay Social Security taxes on all their income, I was met with this instead, that the present and proposed cuts in the payroll tax do nothing but finance the extension of the Bush tax cuts which, evidently, benefit only the rich:

Specifically, I'm talking about a new proposal to rob from Social Security to fund a continuing tax break for people who don't need Social Security — the wealthy. ...

It started back in December, when President Obama capitulated to the GOP on a budget deal by cutting the payroll tax, which funds Social Security. Advocates for the program pointed out then the shortcomings of this approach: It was targeted inefficiently and unfairly, skewing to the upper middle class and hurting lower-income families in comparison with the Making Work Pay tax credit it replaced.

Nevermind that the ten year Bush tax cut regime is responsible for the sorry state of affairs in which we presently find ourselves, with over 45 percent of the population paying nothing in federal income taxes, and a sizeable minority actually enjoying a negative tax rate whereby they receive government welfare through the tax code.

Nevermind that the latter is specifically designed as a subsidy to offset the regressivity of Social Security taxes on the poorest wage earners.

And nevermind that the future solvency of Social Security isn't really front and center in the author's mind, either.

What is Michael Hiltzik's greatest fear?

[O]nce you've cut a tax, it's ever harder to restore it.

You mean like abolishing the Bush tax cuts and thereby raising taxes on the poor by 50 percent?

I'll say.

Or how about this one?

In 2008, the top 14 million tax returns had AGIs totaling $3.8 trillion. If a liberal were really serious, he'd be advocating taxing all this income to make not just Social Security solvent, but Medicare, too. At 6.2 percent, we're talking an extra $236 billion of foregone tax revenue annually.

As tax loss expenditures go, it's the largest one I know of, by a long shot. But try getting people to focus on that one instead of my measly mortgage interest deduction, a tax loss expenditure of $88 billion.

Liberals are so caring.

Leftist FDL Slams Obama for Kicking Housing Can Down the Road

And rightly so:

The design of HAMP simply kicked the can down the road. It was never designed to be a durable solution for the housing market. And we’re seeing the results: four years after the housing crash, prices keep dropping, distressed properties keep popping up on the market, and people keep losing their homes.

It also shows how the homebuyer’s tax credit was a useless giveaway to people wealthy enough to buy homes, which did nothing to alter the fundamentals of the housing market.

The rest is worth reading, too, here.

"The Tax Code is 10 Times Longer Than the Bible, Without the Good News"

So says Republican Representative Dave Camp of Michigan, and George Will approves, here, especially with the additional observation that it is not right that the bottom two income quintiles pay no taxes whatsoever, and receive direct cash payments in the form of refundable tax credits.

Real conservatives agree: everyone needs to have skin in the game.

Rush's Brain Goes on Vacation Early

Today he's said the SPENDING in the $857 billion bill extending the Bush TAX rates for two years was minimal, and that the majority of it, $700 some billion, had to do only with the tax rates.

Pure rubbish.

A lazy, over-generalized point showing yet again lack of show prep, and an effort to co-opt the outrage and the influence of the Tea Party, which Rush is trying to steer toward establishment politics to prevent it from exploding into a genuine third party movement.

The tax rates, extended for two years, will cost just over $207 billion, not $700+ billion. The rest is all tax credits, fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax yet once again, and a host of other goodies handed out via the tax code in order to mask what's really going on: the rich and the poor getting special favors through the tax code at the expense of the chumps in the middle who must pay and pay and pay.

Wake up Rush, you dunderhead.

Here's a table breaking it all down.

Tax 'Em All: Let God Sort 'Em Out

People who claim, like Rush Limbaugh, that no one is undertaxed in this country don't know what they are talking about. Both the rich and the poor are undertaxed. Here is why.

For tax year 2008, IRS figures show that the top half of the country, over 69 million tax returns, contributed in excess of 97 percent of the tax revenue, $1.004 trillion. The bottom half, over 69 million returns, contributed less than 3 percent of the revenue, $27.9 billion, a staggeringly small sum by comparison.

The effective tax rate on the top half was 13.66 percent, on the bottom half just 2.6 percent.

It seems self-evident that the poorer half of the country escaped a lot of taxation, but how?

For one thing, George Bush's creation of the 10% tax bracket in 2001 reduced federal tax revenues from payers in the 10 percent bracket by $42 billion per year. For another, the Earned Income Tax Credit diverts away even more money, now approaching $50 billion per year. These credits wipe out any federal income taxes qualifying filers may owe, and actually reimburse many of them for the payroll taxes they pay, so that many actually have a negative tax rate. This is using the tax code to provide what amount to direct welfare payments, stimulus spending, whatever you want to call it. But it sure isn't "taxes."

But the poorest Americans are not the only beneficiaries.

These credits also percolate far up through the income quintiles. And none penetrate as high as the child tax credit does, relieving the middle classes of taxes to the point that many people in the middle quintile earning between $38,551 and $61,801 also pay little to no federal income tax at all. Created under Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton and expanded under George Bush, this credit now reduces federal revenues by $143.4 billion per year. People even in the top income quintile, making in excess of $100,000 a year, can qualify for this credit, which also directly reduces their tax bill, and government revenues.

Taken together, the 10% bracket, the EITC and the Child Tax Credit help taxpayers to be sure, but at a cost of nearly $2.4 trillion over ten years to the federal government.

Compare that with the big tax break the top earners in the country enjoy because the payroll tax cap is set at $106,800. Everything they earn after that escapes the 6.2 percent tax. The annual cost of that is now $130 billion, or $1.3 trillion over a decade. The denizens of the top 25 percent of taxpayers, who earn 68 percent of the total adjusted gross income in this country, will doubtless complain that they already contribute 86 percent of the tax revenue.

But the result is that a narrower and narrower band of taxpayers in the fourth quintile (those making between $61,802 and $100,000 per year) and in the top half of the middle quintile (about $52,000 to $61,800), gets squeezed with responsibility for income and payroll taxes without enjoying the relief provided to their poorer fellows who pay very little in taxes, or their richer ones who can afford them.

A ladder needs rungs on it to get from the bottom to the top and back down again, and ours in the upper half are getting worn out.

4 of 6 Current Tax Rates Already Do Not Apply to 80% of the Country

Per the US Census, all US households divide into five groups of equal size along these income lines for 2009:

1) $0 to $20,453

2) $20,454 to $38,550

3) $38,551 to $61, 801

4) $61,802 to $100,000

5) over $100,000 (the top 5% make in excess of $180,000).

Current tax brackets are concentrated on the fifth group, the over $100,000 set, so that the top four of the six brackets affect the top 20% of earners in the population the most:

10% for adjusted gross incomes $0 to $16,750

15% on AGIs to $68,000

25% on AGIs to $137,300

28% on AGIs to $209,250

33% on AGIs to $373,650

35% on AGIs above $373,650.

The result is that 60% of the country is responsible for very little tax revenue, and the expansion of various credits like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Credit have meant that an increasingly large percentage of the population is paying no tax at all.

For the 2008 tax year the Tax Foundation reported here that 36% of filers paid no tax at all:

Nonpaying status used to be a sure sign of poverty or near-poverty, but Congress and the President have changed the tax laws to pull much of the middle class into the growing pool of nonpayers. The income level at which a typical family of four will owe no income taxes has risen rapidly, now topping $51,000. 

As a result, recently released IRS data for the 2008 tax year show that a record 51.6 million filers had no income tax obligation. That means more than 36 percent of all Americans who filed a tax return for 2008 were nonpayers, raising serious doubts about the ability of the income tax system to continue funding the federal government's ballooning expenditures. 

The situation worsened dramatically in 2009, to 47%, according to the Tax Policy Center in this AP story: 

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization. ...The bottom 40 percent, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. For those people, the government sends them a payment.

"We have 50 percent of people who are getting something for nothing," said Curtis Dubay, senior tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. ...The number of households that don't pay federal income taxes increased substantially in 2008, when the poor economy reduced incomes and Congress cut taxes in an attempt to help recovery. 

In 2007, about 38 percent of households paid no federal income tax, a figure that jumped to 49 percent in 2008, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center. 

In other words, the tax code under George Bush and the Republicans in 2001 and 2003 became an instrument of liberal social policy, providing massive social spending on America's middle and lower classes. Combined with George Bush's massive hand out to the elderly in the form of drugs for seniors you now understand why liberals hate George Bush so much: because he out-liberaled the liberals. 

And don't expect to hear about it from Rush Limbaugh. He thinks there isn't anyone in the country who is undertaxed. 

If there were really any conservatives left in the country, they'd be calling for a complete end to these subsidies because they represent government spending which we cannot afford, and for a broader tax base which embodied every American's patriotic duty to contribute to the general welfare. 

A real conservative would equate exempting low incomes from taxation with the practice of exempting high incomes from taxation. The "refund" checks which "the poor" receive from the government when they file their taxes are no different from the exemption the rich receive when payroll taxes are not collected on income above $106,500. The former are justified as offsets of the payroll taxes the poor pay, the latter as exemptions from contributions the rich would never live to recoup. Everyone in a narrower and narrower middle pays and pays those taxes, year in and year out, to benefit the poor and the elderly. It is unsustainable.

Why Rush Limbaugh Can't Tell The Truth About Income Taxes

Rush claims no one in America is undertaxed.

He doesn't want to mention, of course, that nearly half of America doesn't pay income taxes.

And why don't they pay taxes? Because that's been the goal of Republican tax policy since the 90s:

"The dramatic increase in the number of people who owed no income taxes since the mid-90s was driven almost entirely by the creation and expansion of the per-child tax credit, a policy driven by the Right."

-- Keith Hennessey, April 15, 2010, here

The Democrats hate Republicans as much as they do because Newt Gingrich and George Bush out-liberaled the liberals. How dare they!

The Tax Elephant in the Room: The Poor Don't Pay Their Fair Share

Once again, the Republicans are about to blow it.

What's needed for the country right now, attempting to leave politics out of the discussion for a moment, is a tax system which is reasonably fair and predictable for the long haul. But what we've got, thanks to George W. Bush, is an unfair system which is deliberately gamed at the extremes, at the expense of the middle. And extending it for another two years just kicks that can of crap down the road.

Under it, nearly half of Americans, those at the low end, pay no federal income tax whatsoever, and millions of them actually get subsidies through the tax code in the form of a big fat "refund" check when they paid no taxes in the first place. These were expanded under Bush, and are defended as offsets of payroll taxes. Do the poor really need yet another offset, in the form of a temporary reduction in the payroll tax rate, especially considering that Social Security is an unfunded liability which is going broke fast?

Compared to the rates they replaced under Clinton, Bush's rates on everyone but the rich are projected to cost the treasury something like $3 trillion going forward, while only an additional $700 billion in tax loss expenditures are predicted to be forfeited from the well to do. Yet the Democrats characterize this as tax cuts for the rich. In point of fact, it's been massive tax cuts for everyone else, especially for the poorest, in the form of subsidies like the Earned Income Credit, the Child Tax Credit, and the creation of the lowest 10% bracket.

Those at the high end, people making in excess of about $106,000, get a huge payroll tax break of their own. They pay zero in payroll taxes above that ceiling at the same time that they pay the vast majority of federal income taxes with a top rate around 35%.

People who've lived a little remember when the poorest among us had one income tax rate, 15%, and the richest another, 28%. What makes those rates in principle unfair now?

Under them today's poorer Americans might actually pay some taxes for a change. And don't they have a responsibility to do so? Didn't Joe Biden tell us paying taxes was the patriotic thing to do? Back in the day the Senator's son got the deferment while the white trash got his ass shot off in Vietnam. Now the "deferment" goes to both the poor and the rich.

Wealthier Americans would see a decline in the rate of the federal tax they paid, that is true. But a broad-based single higher rate on income could be paired with an increase on the payroll tax cap. Why should people who make millions pay no Social Security tax on that income? Social Security is a regressive tax because it taxes the poor end the most and not the rich end. By distributing its pain on everyone equally maybe we would actually have an incentive going forward to put that boondoggle on a more solid footing once and for all, along with the rest of government.

To which end, Republicans should not compromise with the devil. If he won't bow and extend the Bush tax rates, and only the rates, permanently, then Republicans should let them expire. At least the rich will pay a little more, and the rest of us a lot more, and especially the poor. And Obama will get the blame.

BUSH SUBSIDIZED THE POOREST AMERICANS AND CUT THEIR TAXES 33%

Because George Bush was a flaming socialist. The left hated him as they did not because of the Iraq war but because he out-performed them as a liberal. And if Obama lets the Bush tax cuts expire, the poorest Americans will lose their subsidies and their taxes will go up 50%, and Obama will become a conservative and all will be well with the world!

In 2000, the top 60 percent of taxpayers paid 100 percent of all income taxes.

The bottom 40 percent collectively paid no income taxes.

Lawmakers writing the 2001 tax cuts faced quite a challenge in giving the bulk of the income tax savings to a population that was already paying no income taxes.

Rather than exclude these Americans, lawmakers used the tax code to subsidize them. (Some economists would say this made that group's collective tax burden negative.)

First, lawmakers lowered the initial tax brackets from 15 percent to 10 percent and then expanded the refundable child tax credit, which, along with the refundable earned income tax credit (EITC), reduced the typical low-income tax burden to well below zero.

As a result, the US Treasury now mails tax "refunds" to a large proportion of these Americans that exceed the amounts of tax that they actually paid.

All in all, the number of tax filers with zero or negative income tax liability rose from 30 million to 40 million, or about 30 percent of all tax filers.

The remaining 70 percent of tax filers received lower income tax rates, lower investment taxes, and lower estate taxes from the 2001 legislation.

Consequently, from 2000 to 2004, the share of all individual income taxes paid by the bottom 40 percent dropped from zero percent to minus 4 percent, meaning that the average family in those quintiles received a subsidy from the IRS.

By contrast, the share paid by the top quintile of households (by income) increased from 81 percent to 85 percent.

Expanding the data to include all federal taxes, the share paid by the top quintile edged up from 66.6 percent in 2000 to 67.1 percent in 2004, while the bottom 40 percent's share dipped from 5.9 percent to 5.4 percent.

Clearly, the tax cuts have led to the rich shouldering more of the income tax burden and the poor shouldering less.


Read the rest from Brian Riedl, here.

"The Feds Have No Faith in Recovery"

Penetrating analysis here from the chief economist at Delta Global Advisors.

November 5, 2009

The Feds Have No Faith in Recovery

By Michael Pento

The stock market has enjoyed a significant rally since the end of the first quarter. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported last week that the economy grew at a 3.5% annual rate in the third quarter--a figure they achieved by that claiming inflation was running at only a 0.8% annual rate, despite a sharp drop in the dollar, a spike in commodity prices and record highs for gold.

The cyclical bull market in stocks and positive print on GDP has caused some on Wall Street and in Washington to claim the recession has ended. Despite all the good economic news, an end to fiscal and monetary stimulus is nowhere in sight, precisely because policymakers know the happy news is artificially derived.

A closer look indicates that neither the administration nor the Federal Reserve believes its own recovery rhetoric. They understand that the economy will not prosper without continued life support.

I believe removing such artificial stimulus is needed so the country can immediately begin de-leveraging and to prevent the accumulation of yet more baneful debt. What is truly amazing is how many people on Wall Street are foolish enough to postulate that our problems have been solved. The stock market will not be so easily fooled for much longer.

The Great Depression Part II was narrowly averted last year by slashing interest rates to near zero. The Fed made money virtually free because the record level of indebtedness ($34 trillion) in the economy required such low rates so that borrowers could service their obligations. Otherwise a cataclysmic domino effect of defaults and bankruptcies would have occurred. To avoid that scenario, the public sector assumed some of the private sector's debt and then subsequently took on a significant amount more. The debt of the nation continues to increase at a 4.9% annual rate. All public debt is ultimately the responsibility of the private sector to pay off--either directly or through future taxes. As a result, the economy has never been more precarious than it is today.

In spite of this, the stock market appears to be doing quite well. We've seen a 57% rally off the March lows in the S&P 500. However, if you measure the market against other assets its performance is much less impressive. Since the beginning of 2000 the S&P is down about 50% measured in terms of a basket of currencies other than the falling U.S. dollar. The index is down nearly 80% against the real inflation hedge--gold!

The sad truth is that this recent market rally has been produced on the back of a weakening dollar and the slashing of corporate overhead. Cutting payrolls and research and product development projects are not a prescription for sustainable growth. As I like to say, you can't burn your furniture to keep your house warm forever. Eventually, top-line revenue growth must emerge or Wall Street's game of beat-the-expectations will be short lived.

It's also worth noting that a country cannot devalue itself to prosperity and that a bull market cannot survive an inflationary environment for long. In the short run, nominal gains in the averages can occur since everything priced in dollars tends to increase in value. However, the rally will be truncated unless the Fed provides consumers and corporations with a stable currency.

The ramifications of a crumbling currency are vastly misunderstood. A strong dollar is the cornerstone of a healthy economy. It is essential for balanced growth and healthy investment to occur. On the other hand a weak currency decimates the middle class and the corporate sector's ability to maintain earnings growth. Inflation lies behind all infirm currencies, and it is inflation that destroys the purchasing power of consumers. The diminished value of their wallets leaves them with the ability to buy only non-discretionary items. As a direct result, unemployment rates soar and economic output plunges.

I believe we will suffer from a protracted period of stagflation. Money supply, as measured by M2, has increased 5% Y.O.Y. Meanwhile the output of goods and services is falling. As long as the money supply is chasing a shrinking GDP pie, there will be upward pressure on prices.

Making the situation even worse is the manner in which the money supply is growing. The quality of growth is very low because the increase in supply is coming from commercial bank purchases of Treasury debt, rather from an issuance of credit to the private sector for capital goods creation. Total Loans and Leases at Commercial banks are down 8.2% from last year. Meanwhile, the amount of Treasuries held at all commercial banks is up 20% year-on-year.

That means money supply growth is emanating from government's misallocation and redirection of capital. It isn't being loaned out to build mines and factories; it is instead being loaned out to increase consumption and build even more consumer debt.

If the Treasury and Federal Reserve truly believed the economy and the stock market were on a sustainable recovery path, talk of extending and increasing the home buyer's tax credit would be off the table. The Fed would already be reducing the size of the monetary base. The truth, however, is that no one in government really believes in this recovery. If they did, they would be hiking interest rates and the deficit would be shrinking.

The government's realization of our precarious economic condition means its largess will continue. Near term, that may ease some pain. So did the artificial stimulus that gave rise to the housing boom. In the end, a protracted period of a near-zero interest rates, along with endless economic stimulus, will spawn another bubble and not a genuine recovery.

Michael Pento is chief economist at Delta Global Advisors and a contributor to greenfaucet.com.