Federal Income Tax History

[Spartness]

Anybody who thinks FDR was a great president, look at how high the taxes had risen under his watch. I realized it was done in the Great Depression, but still, good grief! I hope Obama doesn't have anything like that in mind.

 

 

http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/151.html

[HuskerExpat]

They were that high under Repub presidents as well. They were the highest under Eisenhower. That said, it was a different era then. One where it was perfectly ok to take a lot of money from the rich in order to fund social programs, etc.

 

Today the pendulum has swung to the other extreme where the rich have an effective tax lower than most middle class taxpayers. In my line of work I represent a lot of very rich people. All of them pay a much lower percentage of their adjusted gross income in taxes than I do. Warren Buffet currently has a challenge to Fortune 500 CEOs. He will pay $1,000,000 (or something like that) to any CEO that can show that he pays a higher effective tax rate than the CEO's secretary. Buffet hasn't paid out on that challenge yet.

[HuskerExpat]

Buffett cited himself, the third-richest person in the world, as an example. Last year, Buffett said, he was taxed at 17.7 percent on his taxable income of more than $46 million. His receptionist was taxed at about 30 percent.

 

Washington Post Article

[Spartness]

Buffett has said he should pay more taxes. Fine. If he wants to pay more, he can send a bigger check to Uncle Sam. He hasn't yet as far as anybody knows. That is what is so ironic about his comment. If the Hollywood nuts think the rich don't pay enough, go for it. Pay more taxes. No one is stopping you. You will be the IRS's best friend.

 

I understand your point that some CEOs pay less percentage than their secretaries (I am not saying that is right, but what is being ignore here is that Buffett is still paying a lot more taxes than his secretary.). But I hope you are not saying the rich should pay 90 percent of their income to Uncle Sam.

[Spartness]

Deleted duplicate post.

[bennychico11]

But I hope you are not saying the rich should pay 90 percent of their income to Uncle Sam.

 

apparently that was pretty much the case years ago!

 

I don't think it's ironic that he doesn't pay more even though he knows he should. If any one of us had nearly as much money as he does we wouldn't offer it to the IRS either.

 

I don't personally think the government needs to tax the rich more, but they need to have a more reverse exponential tax bracket than how it is now.

[T_O_Bull]

Buffett cited himself, the third-richest person in the world, as an example. Last year, Buffett said, he was taxed at 17.7 percent on his taxable income of more than $46 million. His receptionist was taxed at about 30 percent.

 

Washington Post Article

 

Percentage rates are always deceiving. In addition to that, what is the impact on the economy of all the employees that Mr. Buffet either directly or indirectly employes. The same goes for Bill Gates. The big problem is the way the Federal Government spends money. Please reference the 4 ways to spend money as defined by Dr. Milton Friedman, Nobel Lauriet.

>>>T_O_B

[strigori]

I dont think anyone is saying the rich need to pay anything like 90%, but if us regular shmucks have to have 30% ish, then so should the rich. The issue is the tax code gets written by the rich, for the rich.

[huskernumerouno]

This seems to simple, why should anyone pay a higher percentage than anyone else. If a factory worker, secretary, nurse, plumber, mechanic, carpenter, (you get the idea) has to pay say 30% then so should the person making $6.00 an hour or 46,000,000 a year. 30% is 30 % no matter how you slice it.

 

Some might say that the person making 46,000,000 is paying way to much, then I say let him quit his job and pick up a hammer or pipe wrench and only pay 30% of a working mans wage, or work at Burger King and pay 30% of what he earns there.

[zoogs]

FDR *greatly* increased taxes, and he was perfectly right in doing so. For the first time we saw the expansion of federal government in a way that it considered itself responsible to provide a basic safety net for its citizens. It was something that sustained us through the Depression years.

 

Taxes are not always bad, and they are not always good either. FDR took a radical, out-of-the-box approach, and it worked.

 

But there's also a solid reason to give tax breaks to corporations. In a more open market, with less federal regulations, companies have more room to grow, and to spur the economy to grow as a whole. AFAIK, economists generally do agree, or at least see value in cutting taxes in the way Bush did in terms of helping the macro-level economy.

 

Does it peeve people who say, "Look, these guys make way more than me and don't have to pay a higher enough percentage of taxes?" Yes. But making them pay the same taxes as the rest of us out of some sense of fiscal equality doesn't make things better for the economy. The wealthy are in a position to invest and drive the economy that the middle-class is not in. And as the economy as a whole improves, the effects trickle down class lines, so the theory goes.

 

We've had numerous failures in foreign policy under Bush. So numerous it's ridiculous. But while we have also gone through tough economic times, the tax cut plan being implemented does not deserve the hate it's getting. At the very least, the general idea of "cutting taxes" has a lot of merit.

 

By the way, I saw a bit of an excerpt from Clinton's 1996 campaign once on CSPAN. It was a televised debate, I believe, and this is what he said (paraphrased): 'we're going to fix education, and we're going to do it by lowering taxes.'