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Title: 45 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax
Source:
NY Post
URL Source: http://nypost.com/2016/02/24/45-per ... ans-pay-no-federal-income-tax/
Published: Feb 24, 2016
Author: MarketWatch
Post Date: 2016-02-24 19:05:36 by cranky
Keywords: None
Views: 8313
Comments: 28
Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year. An estimated 45.3 percent of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.) Roughly half pay no federal income tax because they have no taxable income, and the other roughly half get enough tax breaks to erase their tax liability, explains Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center. Despite the fact that rich people paying little in the way of income taxes makes plenty of headlines, this is the exception to the rule: The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay a higher effective income tax rate than any other group (around 23 percent, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50 percent. On average, those in the bottom 40 percent of the income spectrum end up getting money from the government. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent of Americans, by far, pay the most in income taxes, forking over nearly 87 percent of all the income tax collected by Uncle Sam. The top 1 percent of Americans, who have an average income of more than $2.1 million, pay 43.6 percent of all the federal individual income tax in the US; the top 0.1 percent — just 115,000 households, whose average income is more than $9.4 million — pay more than 20 percent of it. When it comes to all federal taxes — individual income, payroll, excise, corporate income and estate taxes — the distributions of who pays what is more spread out. This is partially because nearly everyone pays excise taxes, which include taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes. 
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#1. To: cranky (#0)
There is no doubt it is a travasty, the rich paying income tax while others pay none. There is a simple solution, abolish all tax breaks, a politically suicide measure, or reform the tax scales. I know it has little relevence but might gtive some perspective, where I live the big political debate of the year has been tax reform, with the suggestion of broad ranging reform but slowly, the options have been whittled away until we are left with changing the rate on superannuation earnings and the amount that may be claimed on comntibutions and some vague provisiosn on rental income which we know will disappear before an election, because it is political suicide to do anything with tax but give a tax break. How lame is changing one step in the rate from $80,000 to $85,000, who earns $85,000 anyway? So you are stuck with the decisions of the past unless you are willing to make structural reform
#2. To: paraclete (#1)
About 20% of those reporting AGI in 2015 reported $85K or higher.
That's one of the favorite ways the Federal government controls or at least tries to control the behavior of taxpayers. They're not about to give that up.
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Replies to Comment # 1. ..... who earns $85,000 anyway?
#4. To: paraclete (#1)
abolish all tax breaks
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