Taxes
Stop tax giveaways to global corporations.
(Taxes)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-bankroll-corporations.html?pagewanted=all&mcubz=3
“For years, mayors and governors anxious about local jobs had agreed to G.M.’s demands for cash rewards, free buildings, worker training and lucrative tax breaks. As late as 2007, the company was telling local officials that these sorts of incentives would “further G.M.’s strong relationship” with them and be a “win/win situation,” according to town council notes from one Michigan community.”
“Yet at least 50 properties on the 2009 liquidation list were in towns and states that had awarded incentives, adding up to billions in taxpayer dollars, according to data compiled by The New York Times.”
http://thehill.com/opinion/finance/362436-gop-tax-plan-a-corporate-giveaway-disguised-as-reform
“The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report released earlier this week said this bill will actually hurt poor people more than originally thought and that it would add $1.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. “
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/27/tax-cut-fever-republican-supply-side-theory-hogwash-bruce-bartlett-column/704464001/
“Virtually everything Republicans say about taxes today is a lie. Tax cuts and tax rate reductions will not pay for themselves; they never have. Republicans don’t even believe they will, they are just excuses to slash spending for the poor when revenues collapse and deficits rise.”
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickle-down-lie
From a conservative columnist, Dr Thomas Sowell.. “While there have been all too many lies told in politics, most have some little tiny fraction of truth in them, to make them seem plausible. But the "trickle-down" lie is 100 percent lie.”
“It should win the contest both because of its purity — no contaminating speck of truth — and because of how many people have repeated it over the years, without any evidence being asked for or given.”Undertaxing the rich means overtaxing the rest of us.
(Taxes)
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/tax-fairness-briefing-booklet/fact-sheet-taxing-wealthy-americans/
It’s time for the wealthiest Americans and big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes. When they take unfair advantage of the many loopholes in the tax code the rest of us pick up the tab.
http://www.ctj.org/pdf/regcg.pdf
For reference…. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was booming, the wealthiest Americans paid a top income tax rate of 91%. Today, the top rate is 43.4%.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/09intop400.pdf
The average federal income tax rate of the richest 400 Americans was just 20 percent in 2009.
http://cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/43768_DistributionTaxExpenditures.pdf
Taxing investment income at a much lower rate than salaries and wages are taxed loses $1.3 trillion over 10 years.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2011/08/irs-1470-millionaires-paid-no-income-tax-in-09/1#.WpGRWxPwZfQ
1,470 households reported income of more than $1 million in 2009 but paid zero federal income taxes on it.
http://www.epi.org/publication/rising-income-inequality-role-shifting-market/
30 percent of income inequality is due to unfair taxes and budget cuts to services and benefits.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2207372
The largest contributor to increasing income inequality has been changes in income from capital gains and dividends.Fifty years of Republican tax cuts for the wealthy. Has it trickled down to you?
(Taxes)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trickle-down-economics-is-a-nightmare-kansas-proved-it/2017/06/12/c2d7aae0-4fa6-11e7-91eb-9611861a988f_story.html?utm_term=.fd5ce72de6fd
Trickle-down economics is a nightmare. Kansas proved it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/11/30/im-a-depression-historian-the-gop-tax-bill-is-straight-out-of-1929/?utm_term=.1ae3f0ea4811
“There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan declared in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”
“That was more than three decades before the collapse of the economy in 1929. The crash followed a decade of Republican control of the federal government during which trickle-down policies, including massive tax cuts for the rich, produced the greatest concentration of income in the accounts of the richest 0.01 percent at any time between World War I and 2007 (when trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the hyper-rich, and deregulation again resulted in another economic collapse).”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/business/economy/tax-cuts-incomes.html
During Reagan’s years….“For one in two Americans, though — those in the bottom half of the income pile — income actually shrank on Reagan’s watch. In 1980, the year he was elected, they earned $16,371 a year on average, in today’s dollars, according to the World Wealth and Income Database. By 1988, Reagan’s last year in office, they had to make do with $16,268.”
https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-legacy-of-the-2001-and-2003-bush-tax-cuts
“The biggest tax policy changes enacted under President George W. Bush were the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, often referred to as the “Bush tax cuts” but formally named the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 (EGTRRA) and the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 (JGTRRA). High-income taxpayers benefitted most from these tax cuts, with the top 1 percent of households receiving an average tax cut of over $570,000 between 2004-2012 (increasing their after-tax income by more than 5 percent each year). Despite promises from proponents of the tax cuts, evidence suggests that they did not improve economic growth or pay for themselves, but instead ballooned deficits and debt and contributed to a rise in income inequality.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tax-fiscal/rich-would-benefit-most-from-trump-tax-cut-plan-policy-group-idUSKCN1C42C8
“The wealthiest Americans would benefit the most from President Donald Trump’s proposed tax cuts while many upper middle-income people would face higher taxes, independent experts said on Friday in the first detailed analysis of the plan.”The rich are waging a tax war on the American poor and middle-class.
(Taxes)
https://www.salon.com/2017/07/12/the-class-war-is-a-one-sided-fight-and-the-very-rich-are-winning/
The class war is a one-sided fight — and the very rich are winning
https://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Rich-are-waging-class-warfare-against-the-poor-2185956.php
“And one consequence of the shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work is the creation of many situations in which - just as Warren Buffett and Obama say - people with multimillion-dollar incomes, who typically derive much of that income from capital gains and other sources that face low taxes, end up paying a lower overall tax rate than middle-class workers. And we're not talking about a few exceptional cases.”
“According to new estimates by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, one-fourth of those with incomes of more than $1 million a year pay income and payroll tax of 12.6 percent of their income or less, putting their tax burden below that of many in the middle class.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/01/15/do-the-wealthy-pay-lower-taxes-than-the-middle-class.html
State and local taxes……“The study, from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, found that "virtually every state's tax system is fundamentally unfair, taking a much greater share of income from low- and middle-income families than from wealthy families." It added that state and local tax systems are "indirectly contributing to growing income inequality by taxing low- and middle-income households at significantly higher rates than wealthy taxpayers."
“In other words, it said the tax systems are "upside down," with the poor paying more and the rich paying less. Overall, the poorest 20 percent of Americans paid an average of 10.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes and the middle 20 percent of Americans paid 9.4 percent. The top 1 percent, meanwhile, pay only 5.4 percent of their income to state and local taxes.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/04/billionaire-warren-buffett-i-dont-need-a-tax-cut.html
On US tax system….”Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is keenly aware of the potential for gross inequality in the very system that has allowed him his own success. The octogenarian investor is worth almost $80 billion and is the third richest person in the world, according to Forbes.”
https://uspirg.org/news/usp/offshore-tax-havens-cost-small-businesses-3244-year
“Every year, corporations avoid paying an estimated $110 billion in state and federal income taxes by using complicated accounting tricks to book their profits to subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. This leaves small businesses to compete on an uneven playing field, and they, along with the average taxpayer, end up picking up the tab in the form of higher taxes, cuts to public priorities, or bigger deficits”Taxes generate the revenue that finance our future.
Tax revenues are a patriotic investment in our future.