The Tomah Journal raises a great point about folks like Republican U.S. Senate candidate Terrence Wall, whose income puts him among Wisconsin’s top one percent of wage earners (emphasis mine):
Required candidate filings put Wall’s 2009 income at as much as $14.2 million, near the top of Wisconsin’s richest 1 percent. Households in that elite sliver of the state, notes one Wisconsin research institute, pay only 6.7 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes. Working families in Wisconsin’s bottom 20 percent average a state and local tax bill that runs 9.2 percent.
Or in the case of Terrence Wall’s household, they pay 0.0% of their incomes in state and local taxes.
why is it ok to bash the (so-called) rich? I don’t get it. It seems just as prejudiced and wrong to me as any other form of bashing. Except for commie bashing lol j/k
Rich, why is it okay for the folks who are the best off among us to pay less in taxes than the rest of us? Why should I pay more in taxes (as a percentage of my income) than someone making 10 times what I make?
I’m not bashing the rich; I’m just noting that our tax system is inherently flawed.
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/incometaxandtheirs/a/whopaysmost.htm
In 2002 the latest year of available data, the top 5 percent of taxpayers paid more than one-half (53.8 percent) of all individual income taxes, but reported roughly one-third (30.6 percent) of income.
The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 33.7 percent of all individual income taxes in 2002. This group of taxpayers has paid more than 30 percent of individual income taxes since 1995. Moreover, since 1990 this group’s tax share has grown faster than their income share.
Taxpayers who rank in the top 50 percent of taxpayers by income pay virtually all individual income taxes. In all years since 1990, taxpayers in this group have paid over 94 percent of all individual income taxes. In 2000, 2001, and 2002, this group paid over 96 percent of the total.
Treasury Department analysts credit President Bush’s tax cuts with shifting a larger share of the individual income taxes paid to higher income taxpayers.