Investor's Business Daily: About That Middle-Class Squeeze... (HT: Mark Perry)
The poor in America pay virtually no taxes at the federal level. What taxes they do pay have been falling for decades. The total effective federal tax rate — for income, payroll and excise taxes — for the bottom 20% of U.S. households was halved from 1979 to 2005.
From 2000, the year before President Bush took office, to 2005, after his tax cuts had fully kicked in, their total effective federal tax rate fell by nearly a third.
At the other end of the scale, the total effective federal tax rate for the top quintile fell by a mere 7.3% from 1979 to 2005 and by 8.9% from 2000 to 2005. If you look at households with children, the difference is even more stark — for the top incomes, taxes have risen, while those at the bottom saw a whopping 85.7% cut.
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What more do the Democrats want? Under the Bush tax cuts, the top 1% paid 39.4% of federal income taxes in 2005, up from 37.4% in 2000 and 30.3% in 1995, when the Clinton administration was in charge and had pushed a tax hike through a Democratic Congress.
As for the bottom 50%, they paid 3.1% of federal income taxes in 2005, down from 3.9% in 2000 and 4.6% in 1995.
Deja vu! Did not your humble Kronicler point this out just last week in the post Taxing Questions? :) I'm glad folks with bigger megaphones are now talking about this.
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