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Taxes on the rich are near 30-year highs (so say lib groups)

hypocritexposer

Well-known member
As Democratic leaders push for wealthy families to pay higher taxes as part of a budget deal comes some startling news: The rich are actually paying federal tax bills approaching 30-year highs.


[/b]The average tax payment for a high-income family has rarely been higher, according to data going back to 1979, when the Congressional Budget Office started tracking the information. The report comes from the Associated Press, which cites projections from the liberal-leaning Tax Policy Center.


Families in the top 20% will pay an average of 27.2% of their incomes in federal tax this year, according to the research organization, which is a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, both considered to be liberal-leaning groups.


So, who fits into the top 20% of U.S. earners? Families with average incomes of $204,490. Their average tax bill will total more than $55,000 this year, according to the Tax Policy Center. This group of families will carry a huge share of the federal tax burden, at 71.8%.


Meanwhile, the average family in the bottom 20% won't pay any federal taxes. Because many of those families will receive tax credit payments, they actually have a negative tax rate, according to the group.


"My sense is that high-income people feel abused by being targeted always for more taxes," Tax Policy Center fellow Robertson Williams told the AP. "You can understand why they feel that way."


The top 20% of families paid an average federal tax rate of 27.1% in 1979, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office that's cited on the Tax Policy Center's website. That had declined to a low of 23.2% in 2009, when President Barack Obama was serving the first year of his first term. The Tax Policy Center's site displays data only from 1979 through 2009.


The analysis comes after the Senate Democrats last week failed to advance a proposal that would have put higher taxes on millionaires. That's something the Republicans oppose. A competing Republican bill also failed, and the sequester started taking effect after Friday's deadline passed.


Obama blamed the Republicans, saying that they "voted to let the entire burden of deficit reduction fall squarely on the middle class."


But according to the Tax Policy Center, the tax burden on the middle 20% of U.S. households has actually declined. That group, which makes an average of $46,600 annually, will pay 13.8% of their income on average in federal taxes this year, down from about 16% over the past three decades, according to the AP.


The worst news might be for the country's biggest earners: Families that make more than $1 million in 2013 will pay 37.3% to the federal government, the study found.


Of course, you might not want to play a sad tune just yet. Average incomes for the top 1% of households more than doubled from 1979 through 2009, while average income for those in the center rose by only one-third, the story notes.


http://money.msn.com/now/post.aspx?post=3f178286-eb3e-4c2e-beb3-b55acd2c0514
 
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