A contest between big spenders

[Preechr]

Yes. You're looking at roughly 700,000 people, all of whom earn over $500,000 per year. The infamous "Top 1%" of earners started at $292,913 earned in 2001, the latest year available, for a total of a little under 1.3 million people, so the folks we're talking about amount to about a little more than half that group... 0.5% of the population?

Gosh, aren't those privileged few "lucky." If the government decided to start taking only 35% of my income rather than the customary 39.6% of it, I guess I'd be so tickled I'd just shit myself. For that 0.5% of people, their combined "refund" thanks to the cuts is slightly more than what the bottom 50% of the earners contributes to the Federal Treasury. I'm sure those hard-earned dollars coming in from the plebes is worth more somehow than that fun-money going back to the elites, right?

The funny part of it is, those eeeeevil tax cuts also increased the amount of those that pay no taxes at all to a record 40% of all filers by raising the threshold for the bottom 10% bracket to $7000 AGI from $6000. That leaves the remaining bit of the bottom 50% (that's 10% of the filers altogether) paying the 4.1% of the total tax bill offerred up by that bottom half.

Yeah... but a lot of those poorest Americans have kids to support, right? Bush-Tax-Cuts to the rescue! For a head of household making only $15000 per year (don't judge!) the earned income tax credit will contribute another $4,273 to the cause, making that poor single mom's "taxes" actually 28.5% of her income.

Did you know that half the filers in this country are married, and the other half file as single or head-of-household? Wanna hear a funny story? Out of the top 20% of earners in this country, 85% of those folks are married. One out of three married couples actually qualify as "rich" according to the IRS. By contrast, just 1 of every 7 single or non-joint filers is in the top income group. Married folks, in fact, pay 75% of the taxes, leaving 25% to the single people.

Isn't that great?! Let's see what we've learned by looking at these numbers... If you earn a lot of money, it's Ok for the government to take 1/3 of it because it has to pay for the kids that poor people can't afford to have. It's better to be single, broke, stupid and squirting out babies, in fact, than it is to get married and work for a living.

Our tax system rewards stupidity and punishes production.

Poor, poor us.