How much do the rich make, pay in taxes, and how much more can they pay?

**Carthoris** · 08-04-2011, 08:42 AM

Looking at the deficit, and the ideas of democrats to tax the rich more. One has to wonder - how much do they pay and how much do they make? We all know rich people pay no taxes right? With their legions of lawyers and tax write offs for mansions and jets. Shockingly, this is about as true as the boogie man. There are some people who don't pay their share across all spectrums of the population, but these are the exception rather than the rule.

Ok, so how do we find out exactly who pays what? Well, we go to the people who collect the money of course!

You mean the IRS actually keeps track of how much money they take in and from which bracket? Amazing. Lets see what they have to say!

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/08in11si.xls

What is this? This is the 2008 income tax returns for the United States. All in one easy to read excel file. Joy, facts! Its only a couple pages long.

*WARNING* Not reading the government issues IRS spreadsheet and replying to this thread denying it would make you a retarded troll. So please, at least make an attempt to be informed by reading this completely non biased spread sheet of numbers that pinpoints who pays what.

Can the rich actually pay our deficit through higher taxes?

Lets look at what we have!

"The first question is: How much do these folks make in total? The answer is about $2.5 trillion.
If we wanted, we could stop here: You’d need to grab almost half that to finance the deficits Obama’s talking about, and for many of these taxpayers, the other half is already taken in federal and local taxes. No one works for free. But even if we can’t completely eliminate the deficit, maybe we can mitigate it substantially. So it’s worth going a little farther.

First of all, not all of that money is “extra.” I assume that when Obama talked about raising taxes on the rich, he didn’t mean he’d tax people who made $250,000 so much that they ended up with less than people who’d made $200,000. So, in this analysis, not only is he limited to taxing people who make over $200,000, but he’s limited to taxing the amounts that exceed $200,000. Of the aforementioned $2.5 trillion, only about $1.6 trillion is left after we subtract every rich filer’s first $200,000.

And of course, the federal government can’t take money it’s already taken, so we need to factor in taxes. Because we counted out the first $200,000 each person earned, we also have to count out the federal taxes on that income — about $50,000 per person. When we calculate the taxes paid beyond that, and subtract that number from the $1.6 trillion above, we end up with less than $1.3 trillion.

And then we have to knock off state and local taxes, which probably average 5 to 10 percent. All told, we’re left with about a trillion dollars."

A trillion dollars of already taxed money. How much of that trillion can you take before you really hurt the rich and cause more financial problems for the country? Even if you took half of the money they have left - it would only be 500b. Keep in mind this would barely dent the budget. Keep in mind you are talking about 4.5 million people paying 111k extra on average.

**Carthoris** · 08-04-2011, 08:43 AM

My thoughts.

About 140 million people file tax returns in the US. They pay 19% overall to the federal government of every dollar made. How can roughly 1/5th of everything made not be enough to pay for our needs as a country? That doesn't even count all the other revenues the government gets. Income tax is only 1/3 of the equation. They spend the other 2/3s too and still don't have enough to keep the government going! Keep in mind all this is just to balance the budget, never mind that there is trillions in debt that we owe on top of it.

I think I have conclusively shown that the rich can not shoulder the entire burden. So, what is the solution? Is there a solution that our politicians will seriously consider? What happens if we just shrug off our responsibility to fix the issue and let the next generation take it up? At what point will it not be able to be put off and what will the consequences be?

**GreenTreeMachine420** · 08-04-2011, 08:57 AM

Rich folks, or those evil bastards who workedu hard to make theyre dreams come instead of waiting for the first and fifteenth of every month, pay more to each government entity than most other people simply because they spend they're more on more things that require sales tax. And if they were all taxed higher than 60%made, most would open up shop in other countries where they could keep more of they're money, for some any higher than what they are currently being taxed is enough to move

**NoDrama** · 08-04-2011, 09:08 AM

There is no solution other than default by inflation.

**mame** · 08-04-2011, 09:22 AM

It's not just about taxing the rich, no lefties are proposing that; What we're proposing is that alongside cuts and reforms raising revenue should be a part of any U.S. austerity program. I mean, we've got plenty of room to raise revenues, we take in less corporate income taxes than almost every advanced nation:

and here is the history of our corporate tax revenue as a percentage of GDP...

Aside from corporate tax rates... The Bush tax cuts, for example, cost over 2 trillion dollars in lost revenue over the last decade compared to what would've been collected under Clinton tax rates, and over 50% of the benefits went to the top couple percent... not only that, but we've been borrowing money to keep this tax break.

You're right, taxing the rich isn't going to solve all our problems by itself but it can help a great deal towards setting this nation on a course towards fiscal sanity.

**Mr Neutron** · 08-04-2011, 09:32 AM

If the US corporate tax rate is better than the rest of the world, why are they leaving the US for places like Ireland?

**mame** · 08-04-2011, 09:33 AM

Likely has something to do with our tax codes treatment of different industries...

**mame** · 08-04-2011, 09:37 AM

Flatten the rates, eliminate most if not all loopholes and there will be no more preferential treatment and done right there will be more revenue... I mean, check out the rapidly growing number of large businesses that are using their status as "S corporations, partnerships, limited liability companies, and sole proprietorships" to save on taxes. Here's CBPP's chart on this trend: