In reply to racerdave600:
I get my hard data from the IRS- http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/indtaxstats/article/0%2C%2Cid=96981%2C00.html#_grp8
Just read the selected income and tax returns file, and you'll see the data where the tax vs. adjusted gross income data show clearly a rate that actually levels out at 25%, and does go down to 22% for earners who get more than $10M.
We DO have a revenue problem. Yes, we have a spending problem, too, but to pretend that it can be fixed by cutting taxes more is either ideoligical or just greedy, since the people who benefit the most are the ones who need the least help.
here's a very easy exercise to run so that we can see the core problem. The most recent income data was for 2009, which was in the middle of the resession, yes? If you go through the IRS income data (Sources of Income), you can see that most people what people are reporting as income.
Since I'm personally harping on long term capitol gains, I'm going to separate that out of the equation, and look at it alone. As a population, we lost $19B in long term gains, as reported in 2009. But of the earning brackets that the IRS breaks out, 5 of them had net gains, pretty sizeable ones, at that.
Now, I can quicly add up the total of that against the extra 20% tax they would need to report- all the groups are in the 35% bracket, so instead of 15%, they should (IMHO) pay it as normal 35% income. Anyway, I'm taking a percentage of the total income that the long term is, and then applying that to the adjusted income- so that one can assume that people would find the same percentage to discount from their total income vs. taxable income.
Only looking at the areas were there was actual income in capital gains, the income was roughly $40B. Adjusted for reductions, that's roughly $35.5B.
Now, if you change the long term gains from 15% to just normal income, that 35.5B in taxable income goes from $5.1B of revenue to $12.1B in revenue. An increase of $7B of revenue, in a down year. We argue over less than that.
When the stock market is going up, that's a lot of money that we just don't collect, and since in 2009, the only groups who made any long term gains also claimed income in excess of $500k, it's not as if they need it. For that matter, if you are an owner of many shares of stock, you can aruge that your ownership actually uses a much larger share of the government pie in the first place, between defense, roads, sewers, internet, etc.
If you think it's a distraction, you've not done the math, as provided by the IRS.
As for employment numbers- that's a red herring if I've ever heard one. If you pay less taxes, you keep more money. For most jobs, it's a whole lot less about taxes than your ability to deliver the product. If your company is capable of making enough product, why would you bother hiring? It's a better move to keep the money. And on the flip side, if you are struggling with making enough product, you will probably hire in spite of the taxes, since you should be able to make more money via that labor than what the taxes will cost you.
One final thing- the idea of capital gains- that means it's better to have money and make it by buying and selling than to work hard and earn money. So people who already have wealth are better than those trying to earn wealth. Simple.
.
mmmm
Directed at no one in particular:
