Comments on: Average Tax Rates on Salaries up to $1,000,000 [2009]

By: Jeff

Jeff — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:13:00 +0000

I am perplexed at what Karen is talking about. She says there is no “logical basis” for a progressive income tax that tops out at roughly 300 grand. While there may be no “logical” basis for this type of income tax system, there is a solid historical basis for it. Simply put, “soaking” the rich was a failure wherever it was tried.

The American case is as profound as the European cases. Historically, income tax receipts fluctuate more with the economy that with congress changing marginal tax rates. Not only that, the era of the “90%” bracket resulted in the 1969 “Alternative Minimum tax” because, as legislatures found out, you CANNOT “soak” the rich.

The data is simply against Karen Hurtz, and I read her blog on the solution to our debt problems.

Not only has receipts kept steady as a % of GDP, the wealthy pay more as a share today that they did in the past with those high brackets.

By: Karen Hurtz

Karen Hurtz — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 08:03:34 +0000

Taxes are a math riddle alright; they never seem to be accurately displayed in these sort of things. I think the part of the chart that’s always missing is the top. There are six different rates in the first $400,000 of income; after that it flat lines.

That’s the scam. There’s no logical basis for an incremental tax system to stop incrementing. Just $30,000 at the bottom of the spectrum can mean the difference between a 10% tax rate and a 25% tax rate (15 percentage points), but add a million dollars and the rate only changes to 35% (10 percentage points. And if you add another $500 million of income the rate only goes up to… Oh, that’s right, it’s still 35%.

Imagine a tax system that kept incrementing so that the guy that made $400M was paying taxes at a higher rate than the poor bastard that only made $195M.

By: LVTfan (google it!)

LVTfan (google it!) — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 01:49:40 +0000

This would be more useful if you could provide some measure showing what percentage of the population falls into each group. Looking at this, one might tend to think that people/taxpayers were evenly distributed across the spectrum, and of course this is not the case.

Also relevant would be to show what percentage of the total salary income goes to taxpayers in each chunk of the horizontal axis.

By: Average Tax Rates from Visualizing Economics - Global Economic Watch - Global Economic Crisis: Cengage Resource Center

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:50:02 +0000

[...] Click here to use the interactive chart at Visualizing Economics. Posted 06-15-2010 5:04 AM by Graham Griffith Filed under: taxes, income distribution, income taxes by brackets, income taxes, average tax rates by salary, visual economics, catherine mulbrandon You must login to your account to comment. If you do not have an account, please register to enjoy the full benefits of the site! Cengage Learning - English Language Teaching | Higher Education | K-12/AP* Honors | Library & Reference | Professional Privacy Statement | Terms of Use | Copyright Notices | Community Server End User License Agreement Careers at Cengage Learning | Contact Cengage Learning *AP is a registered trademark of the College Board, which was not involved in the production of and does not endorse this web site. // // [...]

By: Daily Links for June 14th | Akkam's Razor

Daily Links for June 14th | Akkam's Razor — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 19:59:50 +0000

[...] Average Tax Rates on Salaries up to $1,000,000 [2009] – [...]