LETTER: More taxes by the numbers
Your June 1 editorial (“The rich pay more than their ‘fair share’ of taxes”) brought up some interesting data points. It says that the richest 1 percent of income earners pay 45 percent of income taxes. But this conveniently omits some of the data so that readers don’t understand the full picture.
What the editorial is not telling you is that there are more than just income taxes to be paid. There’s Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, local property taxes and sales taxes to take into account, just to name a few. Table A-7 in the Joint Committee on Taxation report they cite does take some of those into account. When you look at that, the top 1 percent have more than 40 percent of all income in the United States — based on the editorial’s own income brackets — but are paying only 27.5 percent of the total taxes. The top 5 percent of income earners have more than 60 percent of all income in the United States but are only paying 46.1 percent of the total taxes.
I should also note that the top 5 percent earn more than $335,000 per year, the top 1 percent earn more than $819,000 per year and the top 0.1 percent make more than $2.8 million per year (last year’s numbers). The bottom 20 percent made $28,000 or less. You tell me what is “fair.”
