The rich don't pay taxes, so you have to

Everybody gets cranky about taxes at this time of year. Most tend to blame the government, but government spending isn’t why you pay too much. It’s because there so many loopholes, our tax code is a welfare program for the wealthy. As this author finds after researching the historical numbers:

Then I went back a few years to the 1970s when soon-to-be-in-power Republicans became convinced that lowering taxes on the rich would generate more revenue. It didn’t work. Federal revenues are currently at their lowest level in 60 years. The average federal tax rate has gone way down for the richest 1%. Yet, remarkably it’s gone UP for everyone in the 40th to 95th percentiles of taxpayers, which includes most of the rest of us.

And those allegedly “over-taxed” corporations. Ha!

It got worse when I compared my son’s taxes to those of corporations. In the 1950s, for every dollar of payroll tax paid by workers, corporations paid three dollars. Now they pay 16 cents.

Yet the super-rich and giant corporations still whine about their terrible tax burden, even as they pay obscenely less percentage of their income and profits into our national treasury to support an infrastructure that benefits them more than it does any individual taxpayer paying the full tax rate. Also, it’s useful to remember that the super-rich make the majority of their income, not by holding a salaried job, but rather by the fruits of vulture capitalism. Take a look at this captial gains tax chart showing how little they’re taxed already.

Republicans want to reduce the capital gains tax to zero because they claim the super-rich are job creators, even as they lay off thousands of hourly employees and then turn around and give their executives multi-million dollar bonuses. What a con job. The only jobs they’re creating are with “full service tax evasion advisers.” Which leaves us “little people” to pick up the slack.