IRS data shows that in 2007 — the most recent data available — the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.
Remarkably, the share of the tax burden borne by the top 1 percent now exceeds the share paid by the bottom 95 percent of taxpayers combined.
One of the post offices here in Irvine is a best-kept secret . . . it’s off Culver Drive, down a side street and around a corner, basically in a residential area. It’s never busy because, unlike the post office on Sand Canyon, it’s not visible from a major street and most people don’t know it’s there.
My wife emailed me at work yesterday morning to say that she went to that post office and tons of cars were lined up to get in, which reminded her that it was April 15.
Not to worry though. We mailed our taxes on the 14th — to beat that last-minute rush.
Twenty years or so ago, I was living in Hollywood and — on the evening of April 15 — filling up at a gas station just south of the freeway from Union Station. Beyond Union Station on Alameda St. is the Terminal Annex post office.
As I said, it was April 15 . . . cars were lined up on Alameda from the post office, past Union Station and past the gas station for as far as I was able to see. News helicopters were circling overhead filming the Tax Day madness.
A man drove into the gas station, stopped next to me, rolled down his window and said — I am not kidding — “Can you tell me how to get to the post office?”
“Sure. You see that line of cars?”
Taxes make people nuts . . .
WASHINGTON — One of President Barack Obama’s campaign pledges on taxes went up in puffs of smoke Wednesday.
The largest increase in tobacco taxes took effect despite Obama’s promise not to raise taxes of any kind on families earning under $250,000 or individuals under $200,000.
This is one tax that disproportionately affects the poor, who are more likely to smoke than the rich.
Congress doesn’t have its own stash [of money]. Every dollar it injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It’s merely redistributed from one group of people to another.
As you probably learned in school, we founded this country as a free-market economy and viewed government intervention in the market with the greatest skepticism.
The above article is the clearest explanation I’ve seen for why bailouts and “stimulus plans” involving government spending never work.
The latest failed companies hoping for a bailout are General Motors and Ford. I hope Henry Ford — a great American like myself, who is currently whirling like a lathe in his Detroit grave — will pardon me for saying so, but these companies are nothing but engines of mass financial destruction.
According to the WSJ, GM and Ford invested a combined $465 billion between 1998 and 2007.
As of last Friday’s market close, they had market caps of $4 billion (Ford) and $1.7 billion (GM).
They’ve wiped out almost $460 billion of American capital in the last 10 years and now they want more money.
Look — my friend Paul Epps has a sister who spent every dollar she ever had on booze, drugs and abortions. For a while, friends and family members tried to help her by giving her money when she didn’t have any.
Do I have to tell you how that turned out?
I’m not suggesting that executives at Ford and GM spent the $460 billion on booze, drugs and abortions — not all of it anyway — but I am saying that sometimes people who don’t have any money can’t be helped by giving them more money.
Firstly, I’d like to thank Paul Epps for giving me this space on his web site to express my humble views. He is a real American.
What concerns me today is that a candidate for president, Barack Obama, has said that he wants to “spread the wealth around” in America.
It was a long time ago, but let me remind those of you who didn’t pay attention in history class that we founded this country as a rebellion against a too-powerful government. We believed in — and fought for — self-reliance and freedom, including the economic freedom to earn a dollar and spend it any way you want to.
When someone tells you that he is going to decide how much money you can earn before he starts taking it away from you and giving it to someone else, that man is a scoundrel.
And when Americans — the descendants of rebels and revolutionaries — can listen to this and fail to rise up in dissent, it makes me want to vomit for what this once-great nation has become.
Mr. Obama is proposing to raise taxes on capital gains and dividends by a staggering two-thirds, moving the rate up 10 percentage points to 25%, which could curtail investment and business on Wall Street, a backbone of the city’s and state’s economy.
OK, let me get this straight . . . the stock market’s dropping, banks are failing from lack of liquidity, no one wants to invest in American companies, and Obama’s solution is to raise the capital gains tax?!
In the event of an Obama presidency, I will taking a long position in blankets, canned goods and shotgun shells . . .
A lie repeated often enough becomes truth.
As the GOP drifts further to the right, and becomes more starkly the party of the wealthy, it is gaining support among the working class.
I have never seen a wholly satisfactory explanation for this trend, which now spans two generations. . . . Republicans, of course, will argue that it’s simply the working man’s understanding that the GOP has the better argument, i.e., that the best way to help the working class is to shower the rich with tax breaks. But the Bush administration has been showering the rich with tax breaks for more than four years, and the working class has nothing to show for it.
