Rich Only Pay 18% In Tax

Why is this never mentioned on the evening news ... that all the trouble we are in can be directly linked to people not wanting to pay taxes !!! All the talk is about the gov't spending too much .. it is a two-way street .. expenditures yes it's a problem ... but there is also no revenue coming in ... it is one thing in good times to complain about taxes but when police officers & teachers are losing their jobs ... can we even begin to talk about raising taxes to pay for .. u know .. the stuff we need ?


The Great Switch by the Super Rich


Over that four decades, tax rates on the very rich have plummeted. Between the end of World War II and 1980, the top tax bracket remained over 70 percent — and even after deductions and credits was well over 50 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. As recently as the late 1980s, the capital gains rate was 35 percent. Now it’s 15 percent.

Not only are rates lower now, but loopholes are bigger. 18,000 households earning more than a half-million dollars last year paid no income taxes at all. In recent years, according to the IRS, the richest 400 Americans have paid only 18 percent of their total incomes in federal income taxes. Billionaire hedge-fund and private-equity managers are allowed to treat much of their incomes as capital gains (again, at 15 percent).

Meanwhile, more and more of the nation’s income and wealth have gone to the top. In the late 1970s, the top 1 percent took home 9 percent of total national income. Now the top 1 percent’s take is more than 20 percent. Over the same period, the top one-tenth of one percent has tripled its share.

http://robertreich.org/post/5583016733