USAToday: Tax bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950.
Miscellaneous Heathen
Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.
USAToday: Tax bills in 2009 at lowest level since 1950.
More likely, they will use this to yell and scream about deficits.
Well when the Bush tax cuts go off the roll at the end of this year, we will see whose tax bill goes on crack. Your inference that Obama is responsible for tax level is not entirely accurate.
My inference is primarily that tea party people do not understand (a) how taxation works; (b) that tax rates now are lower than they’ve been since the 50s; and (c) that even after any Bush-era cut rollback, we’ll still be bouncing around the same 2 or 3 percent for most brackets.
I always thought that federal tax revenues were tied in some way to household income levels. So if federal tax revenues are at their lowest point since 1950, then current household income levels….
Tax burden is rate of taxation, not amount of tax revenue, so no.
The title of the article refers to “tax bills”, then shifts to “individual tax rates”, then “taxes paid”, then “tax bite”, and then finally, “tax burden”. The article is an incoherent mess. At least they demonstrated the honesty to admit that “Consumers cut spending sharply in this downturn, thereby paying less in sales taxes.” Nothing but the finest journalism from USA Today. Who are “Tea Party People” anyway and how can anybody know so much about what “they” do and do not understand? Are you profiling “them”?
The USAT article wasn’t the only source covering this, chief. It’s pretty trivial to research actual tax rates; Wikipedia’s a great placed to start, and it shows the same basic idea. Tax rates are lower now. 95% of people got a tax cut for 2009 vs 2008.
Even so, the article includes this quote, which is pretty clear:
At the same time, the retronym claimed by the teabaggers is “taxed enough already,” and there’s ample evidence that one of their key rallying points is that they feel they’ve been overtaxed by Obama, which is pretty hilarious given the actual facts on the ground here.
Even funnier is the oft-quoted claims of teabaggers that, given Obama’s plan to raise taxes on households making more than $200-250K, they’d make sure they didn’t earn that much so they wouldn’t lose money — which betrays a certain lack of basic understanding on how progressive tax rates work.
Finally, popular resentment of tax rates in a post-Reagan America is just plain bunkum used to rally reactionary doofuses too clueless to do any research. Tax rates in the US since the mid80s have floated around the same few percentage points for most people. GHWBush tax hike was trivial for most people. GWBush’s cuts were, too, unless you were rich (in which case they were huge). Obama’s tax plan moves some of the burden back to those making the most money (which is appropriate) — but not so much that I’d expect the average middle class household to notice a material difference.
What’s your axe to grind here?
What discourages me more than anything is that I find it almost impossible to constructively engage folks who politically disagree with me without immediately being presented with a host of straw men, red herrings, or change-the-subject redirection. You never get around to comparing and contrasting the principles and beliefs that drive the political leanings that follow from them. Instead, we are reduced to thrashing feebly-constructed straw men until finally, exhausted with the dreadful futility of it all, we abandon the discussion, having learned nothing but how to better employ facile shell game rhetoric that would be more at home at an elementary school playground.
When I state my opinion that our government has chosen the worst possible moment to exhume Keynes, I would hope to be countered by something more than images of obese rural coal miners holding up misspelled protest signs decorated with hammer and sickle cartoons. Have we nothing better to offer than to single out the least and most pitiful among our perceived philosophical opponents and hold them up as fair and reasonable examples of those with whom we disagree?
To name a subset of the conservative movement “The Tea Party” was a really lousy choice, but is it a classy political maneuver to then refer to those people using a term obviously intended to suggest that they enthusiastically participate in a popular gay sex act? Is that what passes for incisive political satire these days? Is there nothing too snide, too smirky?
Maybe it’s more about candor and tone. Both seem to have done to shit in the age of Bill Maher and Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh, the burping toad of the right, telling us “what it all means”, and Maher, insufferably foul, dour, and noxious with his insipid teenage sarcasm. It’s enough to make me want to abandon the conversation. I’m looking for a place to have a little sporty back-and-forth and without almost immediately descending into the same derivative binary Daily Kos vs. Breitbart game of ideological Pong, not that I don’t love the living Sweet Flaming, Floating, and Freshly Powdered Jesus out of a good game of Pong.
That’s really what I’m saying here- I like Pong. 8-bit video games are grossly under appreciated forms of entertainment, and on that, surely we can agree (especially Activision’s Kaboom for the Atari 2600- but you will need a paddle controller in excellent condition to play).
Q.E.F.
Sweet Christ, I love you.
I’m pretty sure this article is absolute BS, in terms of the actual Total tax bite. Sales tax, gasoline tax, property tax, etc. But the real issue is that “Tax reductions” when there is a deficit are the same as “Spending.” The Deficit is still increasing.