Post #347,883
9/20/11 12:42:34 PM
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Pants on Fire
http://news.yahoo.co...es-070642868.html
Millionaires pay more than their secretaries in taxes...so Warren and the President get a rousing "Pants on Fire".
29% vs 15% (if Warren pays his assistant well..otherwise the comparison is even worse as the 15% drops with income class under 75k)
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But...there they are.
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Post #347,886
9/20/11 1:09:58 PM
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Shifting terminology
This is the usual game of shifting terminology that is so common when dealing with taxes. Not entirely your fault, since Obama is also talking pretty loosely.
Buffet said he paid a higher percentage in payroll and income tax then his secretary. The article you link to talks about total federal taxes on average. The two don't line up.
The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes pay more than half of all federal taxes. They pay more than 70 percent of federal income taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
That sort of phrasing is so bad it is hard to believe it is an honest mistake. It is put together to make it sound like the top 10% pay more then their fair share. Saying they pay 70% of income taxes without indicating what percent of income they take leaves you without any basis of comparison.
Jay
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Post #347,892
9/20/11 3:10:23 PM
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That sounds about right.
50% of federal taxes sounds about right.
This is dated but still valid. The top 10% receive 50% of all income.
The Great Compression ended in the 1970s. Wages stagnated, inflation raged, and by the decade's end, income inequality had started to rise. Income inequality grew through the 1980s, slackened briefly at the end of the 1990s, and then resumed with a vengeance in the aughts. In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, the Nobel laureate, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman labeled the post-1979 epoch the "Great Divergence."
It's generally understood that we live in a time of growing income inequality, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it is," Krugman told me. During the late 1980s and the late 1990s, the United States experienced two unprecedentedly long periods of sustained economic growthÂthe "seven fat years" and the " long boom." Yet from 1980 to 2005, more than 80 percent of total increase in Americans' income went to the top 1 percent. Economic growth was more sluggish in the aughts, but the decade saw productivity increase by about 20 percent. Yet virtually none of the increase translated into wage growth at middle and lower incomes, an outcome that left many economists scratching their heads.
http://www.slate.com...025/entry/2266026
Here's a really nice picture from the article:
http://img.slate.com...ettySaez-fig1.gif
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Post #347,902
9/20/11 4:58:41 PM
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coincides quite nicely with
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But...there they are.
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Post #347,901
9/20/11 4:55:13 PM
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nope...they lined up perfectly
and even if you add the 7% to all the classes under 125k cap, they STILL pay at a higher rate (22% or less vs 29.1%).
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But...there they are.
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Post #347,932
9/21/11 10:17:47 AM
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Krugman weighs in on the issue
http://krugman.blogs...Krugman&seid=auto
Well, it seems as if a number of people in the media have decided that Obama was fibbing when he said that some millionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries  because, as the usual suspects triumphantly declare, on average millionaires pay higher average taxes than middle-income Americans.
This is, of course, stupid: the operative word is SOME.
Turns out that if you look at the details, roughly 1/3 of the super rich manage a tax rate of less then 15% and most manage less then 20%. Super rich here being the top 400 house holds in the US. Buffet clearly lands in that that category and could be paying less percent then his secretary even if his secretary is only paying 15%.
In a sense, Obama didn't put his lower limit on the "Buffet rule" high enough. The range he picked included the highest paying Americans, those on the bottom end of the wealthy range.
Jay
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Post #347,934
9/21/11 10:27:44 AM
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of course he continues to shill
and there are going to be "some" secretaries that pay less than their average also.
He's being pedantic and giving him a pass based on one word, when the clear implication of the speech and of Buffets piece is that rich people don't pay as much on % basis as "average" people, which has been clearly shown as false. Inconvenient for them.
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But...there they are.
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Post #347,936
9/21/11 10:41:19 AM
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But if you count ESTATE TAXES...
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Post #347,938
9/21/11 10:46:11 AM
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Then it's worse than an ex wife;-)
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But...there they are.
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Post #348,068
9/23/11 7:57:24 PM
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you are the expert on shills around here
"Chicago to my mind was the only place to be. ... I above all liked the city because it was filled with people all a-bustle, and the clatter of hooves and carriages, and with delivery wagons and drays and peddlers and the boom and clank of freight trains. And when those black clouds came sailing in from the west, pouring thunderstorms upon us so that you couldn't hear the cries or curses of humankind, I liked that best of all. Chicago could stand up to the worst God had to offer. I understood why it was built--a place for trade, of course, with railroads and ships and so on, but mostly to give all of us a magnitude of defiance that is not provided by one house on the plains. And the plains is where those storms come from."
-- E.L. Doctorow
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Post #348,085
9/24/11 12:50:40 AM
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So I should know one when I see him, and he is one
Sure, understanding today's complex world of the future is a little like having bees live in your head. But...there they are.
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