- Joined
- Mar 21, 2005
- Messages
- 25,893
- Reaction score
- 12,484
- Location
- New York, NY
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Slightly Conservative
You may not want to talk about wealth, but there it is just the same.
It's not that I don't want to talk about it, it's that it's irrelevant to a discussion on income tax, because it's untaxable.
"The new data also shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans. Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980."
Bush was in office from 1980-2007? Interesting.
"The disparities may be even greater for another reason. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that it is able to accurately tax 99 percent of wage income but that it captures only about 70 percent of business and investment income, most of which flows to upper-income individuals, because not everybody accurately reports such figures."
The fact that the IRS can tax all reported wage income does not mean that it taxes all wage income. When you factor in the tens of millions of people who work under the table or otherwise underreport their self-employment, I doubt it's that different.