To Oblivion And Beyond!

Joe at the Tax Update Blog links to a report by the Tax Foundation that indicates that more people than ever before are not paying any Federal income taxes.

We liked this particular factoid from the report:

The 42.5 million non-payers are largely low-income. Indeed, 91 percent of them earned less than $30,000 per year and 96 percent earned less than $40,000. Fewer than 1 percent will earn more than $75,000 per year – a group comprised largely of business owners whose tax liabilities will be erased due to business losses, carry-overs from prior year AMT payments, or foreign tax credits.

Why do we like this particular factoid? It's another virtual rolled-up newspaper to whack Dick Doak upside the head with after his laughable column on Monday in which he said this:

The latest trend in creeping socialism for the rich is differential tax rates. The taxes on the capital gains, dividends and inherited wealth of the moneyed class are lowered, effectively shifting the burden onto wages and salaries of the working class.

Dick, of course, can't cite any studies which show that lowering cap gains rates causes the tax burden to be shifted from the rich to the "working class."

(Who the hell are "working class" anyway? Don't the rich work? Maybe Dick is referring to all those Republicans who've never made an honest living in their lives when he's talking about "the rich"? Who knows? You don't know Dick and he'd certainly never explain himself. -Ed.).

Dick can't explain himself because there's a mountain of data out there showing that when you lower the cap gains tax rate, revenue increases. There's also a mountain of data out there demonstrating that when tax rates are lowered for all, the people on the poorer end of the wage-earning scale are taken off the Fed tax rolls and the tax overall burden is shifted towards the higher earners.