(http://www.loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/01/88-reasons-why-president-obama-is.html)
he would rather devolve into class warfare, rich vs. poor, as a campaign strategy. I personally find this brand of Chicago politics despicable, but given his failure in office, it may be the only way he can get reelected, set one group of Americans after another.
If the President and his supporters would do some simple math, it would become very clear that his numbers and strategy of taxing the rich will do nothing to solve the major economic and other issues facing this country. In fact, from my perspective, I am still struggling trying to figure out if the President is lying, ignorant, or just plan bad at math.
The following analyses try to decide whether it is lying, ignorant, or bad math skills that the President is guilty of. All of the following numbers and simple math calculations are based on official U.S. Federal government data from the official IRS website. The data is not from the Republicans, Fox News, Tea Party, social conservatives, neo conservatives, etc.
Let's start with the country's 2009 IRS tax data (2009 is the latest year this data is available for) and with following graph (double click on the graph to get a better, clearer view):
The graph plots the percentage of income taxes paid by income
bands taken from all of the country's 2009 IRS tax returns. What becomes very obvious is that as a tax filer makes more money/has higher income, the percentage of that income that is taken by the IRS grows substantially.
In fact, by the time a tax payer gets to $200,000 in adjusted gross income on the IRS tables, that payer is paying almost 20% of their income to the Federal government. As Americans make more than $200,000, the percentage paid to the Feds continues to go up, on average, so that most people making over $500,000 are paying about 25% of their income to the Federal government.
By using Warren Buffet and his secretary as props in his politics, he tries to infer that all Americans making a lot of money in this country pay less as a percentage of their income than middle class and poorer Americans. As this graph shows, on average, this is ignorance, lying, or bad math skills. While there may be a few cases where rich Americans pay a low percentage in taxes, they are definitely exceptions, as the graph shows. To imply otherwise, is nothing more than deception.
If you look at the lower end of the graph you find that about 58% of American tax filers pay less than 5% of their adjusted gross income in Federal income taxes. And about 90% pay less than 10% of their income in Federal income taxes. Thus, it is hard to believe the President when he portrays Buffet and his secretary as the rule rather than the exception when so many Americans pay so little in Federal income taxes.
But let's dive further into the IRS facts and you decide if the rich get such a free deal at the expense of the poor in this country:
- Only .17% of tax filers in 2009 had adjusted gross income over a million dollars. Thus, it is hard to believe that taxing these few people more would alleviate the country's ills when there are so few of them (only about 237,000 out of 140,000,000 tax filers).
- These .17% of earners account for 9.5% of the IRS adjusted gross income totals but pay 20.5% of all Federal income taxes listed on the 2009 IRS tables.
- The Federal income tax rate of these earners in total is about 24.4%, compared to the 90% of filers who pay less than 10%.
- If we redefine rich as those Americans with adjusted gross incomes of more than $200,000, we find that these earners account for only 2.8% of all American tax returns.
- They also account for only 17.1% of the country's income but pay 50.2% of the country's Federal income taxes.
But let's get a little crazy with the math. Let's assume that Obama was able to tax those earning over a million dollars at 100%, i.e. he could confiscate all of their earnings and redistribute the money to everyone else. That would result in all non-millionaire earners getting about $3,917. But he could only do that for a year or so since who would bother going to work and earning over a million dollars if Obama was just going to seize all of it?
If that happened, within a year or so every non-millionaire earner would have to pay additional Federal income taxes of $5,283 a year since those non-millionaire earners would now have to cover the taxes that used to be paid by millionaire taxes. Not a good deal.
Let's idle back the math. Rather than confiscating 100% of the millionaire earners income, let's assume Obama only confiscated 10% more of it. Thus, every non-millionaire earner would receive $392 a year if that 10% was equally distributed or about $1.80 a day. Hardly worth the effort.
The problem with this approach to taxing the rich class warfare is that it does not solve the major problem facing the country: the Federal government is spending and wasting far more money than taxing the rich can ever cover. The Federal deficit in 2011 was about $1.6 TRILLION.
If Obama confiscated all of the millionaire earnings, assuming that 2009 tax profiles were similar to 2011 tax profiles, the Federal government would have increased their revenue by about $549 billion. In other words, taking all of the earnings of Americans making more than a millions dollars a year in adjusted gross earnings would have covered only about a third of the spending deficit that Obama's administration runs up in one year.
Thus, taking less than 100% of millionaires' earning would cover even less than Obama's outrageous deficit spending. We have a spending issue and waste issue with the Federal government in this country, we do not have an under taxation problem.
Many times in this blog we have documented how the Federal government bureaucracy loses over $500 billion a year to incompetence, fraud, and criminal activity in the Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and tax evasion programs and areas of responsibility. Fixing these problems would go a lot further to solving the country's financial and other problems than raising taxes on .17% of the country's income earners.
But that would require the President to actually do some real work, to get into the detail's of governing, to do things that are impactful for the good of the country rather than trivial for the good of his political career. Governing should be more than ignorance, lying, and bad math skills which serve no real purpose other than class warfare for political gain.
One last fact to keep in mind. Consider the following graph based on the same IRS data:
This data graphs the number of millionaire earners from an
adjusted gross income perspective over the past several years. The vertical line shows when the Democrats took over control of Congress after the November, 2006 midterm elections.
Since then, the number of American millionaire earners has decreased considerably through 2009. From just under 400,000 millionaire tax filers in 2007, within just two years that number had dropped to 237,000 under a Democratic Congress and first year of a Democratic Presidency (about a 40% drop). Since millionaire earners accounted for 20.5% of taxes paid in 2009, as the number of millionaire earners decreases, non-millionaires will have to pay more and more to cover the deficit and government expenses.
At his rate, a 40% drop in millionaire earners in just two years, this argument of ignorance lying and bad math skills might be moot soon since it looks like this Presidency is in the business of depopulating the millionaire tax bracket altogether.
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All of the above data, analyses, and conclusions are based on facts and figures provided by the Federal government itself. For another view of the President's state of the union speech, consider the following link top the Heritage Foundation for their views on the misleading statements and statistics and other deceptions from the state of the union speech:
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