Ron Paul supporters at OWS - cut taxes

According to the IRS, the top 1% of income earners for 2008 paid 38% of income tax revenue, while earning 20% of the income reported.

The top 5% of income earners paid 59% of the total income tax revenue, while earning 35% of the income reported.

The top 10% paid 70%, earning 46% and the top 25% paid 86%, earning 67%.

The top 50% paid 97%, earning 87% and leaving the bottom 50% paying 3% of the taxes collected and earning 13% of the income reported.

The Tax Foundation stated that for 2007, the top 1% of earners paid more than the bottom 95% combined
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And Ron Paul supporters want to cut taxes! And they seem to support OWS movement. Crazy.


The 1% (as OWS likes to call them) are paying 38% of taxes. Ron Paul's solution? Cut taxes. Yet the bottom 50% are paying just 3% of tax revenue, apparently. Hardly makes sense, does it?


Figues for calendar year 2009 here.

From their summary:

The amount of individual income tax paid steeply declined by $166 billion, twice the decline from 2007 to 2008. Nationally, average effective income tax rates were at their lowest levels since the IRS began tracking them in 1986. The average tax rate for returns with a positive liability went from 12.24 percent in 2008 to 11.06 percent in 2009.

As the data below show, incomes reported by tax returns at the high end of the income spectrum fell from 2008 to 2009, as did their share of the nation's income and income taxes paid. In 2009, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 36.7 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 16.9 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI), compared to 2008 when those figures were 38.0 percent and 20.0 percent, respectively. Both of those figures-share of income and share of taxes paid-were their lowest since 2003 when the top 1 percent earned 16.7 percent of adjusted gross income and paid 34.3 percent of federal individual income taxes.

Each year from 2005 to 2007, the top 1 percent's constantly growing share of income earned and taxes paid set a record. The 2008 reversal of this trend continued in 2009. In fact, the income share for the top 1 percent of tax returns was lower in 2009 than in 2000, largely due to differences in capital gains.

Another indicator of this reversal in the income and tax shares of the top 1 percent is that, as in 2008, the top 1 percent no longer pays a larger percentage of total income tax than the bottom 95 percent. This trend was exacerbated by the aforementioned precipitous drop in AGI in 2009. During 2009, the bottom 95 percent (AGI under $154,643) paid 41.3 percent of the total collected, a larger share than the 36.7 percent paid by the top 1 percent (AGI over $343,947).

The top-earning 5 percent of taxpayers (AGI equal to or greater than $154,643), however, still paid far more than the bottom 95 percent. The top 5 percent earned 31.7 percent of the nation's adjusted gross income, but paid approximately 58.7 percent of federal individual income taxes.

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I think that goes some way to supporting the idea that OWS is not a reaction to a realisation that the system is unjust and becoming more so (the figures say different), but rather a reaction to the fact cheap credit for the middle and working classes has been switched off, and their own security and self-interest has taken a hit. They didn't care previously, when the top 1% were doing even better than they are now. After all, who takes the real hit when the stock market crashes? Do the poor own shares? Of course not - not even by proxy via pensions and suchlike. Imagine how much some of the wealthiest have lost these last years? The evidence is there in the tax returns......capital gains returns are way down....so much so that it has caused the top percentile's tax returns to decrease as a share of the national return.