To solve the looming debt crisis, President Obama proposes we tax the “richest Americans and corporations” because they need to “pay their fair share.” It’s going to take “shared sacrifice,” he tells us.
But first, whom exactly is Obama talking about when he says the richest Americans?
According to the Internal Revenue Service’s 2010 database, the top 1 percent of Americans made an average income of about $380 thousand, and the top 5 percent averaged about $160 thousand. These are the people Obama is talking about.
And how much of the income taxes do the richest Americans pay? According to IRS, the top 1 percent pay 38 percent of all the income taxes and the top 5 percent pay more than 58 percent. Moreover, the top 50 percent of income earners pay 97.3 percent.
The top 1 percent are taxed at a rate of 23.27 percent and the top 5 at 20.7 percent, while the bottom 50 percent are taxed at a rate of 2.59 percent. These are federal income tax rates and don’t account for state and local income or payroll taxes.
Obama tries to convince Americans he’s talking about corporations making “tens of billions of dollars,” but that’s a lie. This is a tactic to make everyone think the richest Americans make billions of dollars, when in reality the richest Americans average less than $400 thousand.
If Obama wants the richest Americans and corporations to share sacrifice, we would expect everyone else to be sacrificing more. To the contrary, 47 percent of Americans don’t pay any federal income taxes at all.
Obama and the Democrats love to paint a picture of the “poor” as innocent people “just trying to stretch every dollar as far as it will go.”
I wonder how many Democrats have ever been to a Third World country to see what poor really means. For two weeks I stayed with a family in Costa Rica who had no air conditioning, no hot water, no washer or dryer, and the roof of the house was raised above the walls so that air could circulate in and out. And yet they washed all my clothes, gave me meals every day and never complained about it.
There are definitely some Americans who are truly needy, but it would be ridiculous to think the 47 percent of Americans not paying federal income tax are eating food out of dumpsters.
It’s sickening to hear Obama and the Democrats portray the poor as blameless people in dire need of government help when our poor live lives of luxury in comparison to the poor of other countries.
It isn’t the rich who are paying less than their fair share in taxes. To the contrary, they’re paying much more than everyone else. It’s America’s poor who get free health care and new SUVs who aren’t sharing the sacrifice.
And if we don’t start taxing the rich, Obama wants to withhold Social Security checks. How about the government withholds welfare checks from the “poor” instead of Social Security to those who have actually paid their fair share?
It’s about time the so-called poor Americans share the sacrifice and pay their fair share of taxes.
Austin Casey is a 19-year-old medical physics junior from Mandeville. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_austincasey.
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Contact Austin Casey at [email protected]