The Homa Files

This week, a series of ‘angles’ on the debate to kill or keep the Bush Tax Cuts …

The President’s constant sound bite the past week was that extending the Bush Tax Cuts to ‘the wealthiest Americans’ would be “giving $100,000 to each  millionaire”.

Not so fast.

According to the Tax Policy Center:

• Folks with precisely $1 million in taxable income would pay about $11,000 more under Obama’s scheme than they would if the Bush tax cuts were extended. 
• The top 0.1% — those with average incomes of $8.4 million — would pay $310,000 more under Obama’s proposal.

Bottom line: the average is obviously skewed by a relatively few uber-earners.

So, instead of going after garden variety fat cats, why not go after the obese cats ?

I say, add a few uber-high-end brackets … say,

• Over $500,000 gets nicked, 37.5%;
• Over $1,000,000 gets dinged 40%
• Over $5 million pays 45%, etc.
• Warren Buffett pays 99.6% and stops whining about how he’s undertaxed

Such a scheme would potentially get the dollars (empasis on ‘potentially’ — more on that in a later post) … while impacting the fewest taxpayers.

Seems like a democratic thing to do, doesn’t it ?

* * * * *

Data source:L,A, Times, The tax cut debate, September 15, 2010
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-taxes-20100915,0,6983741.story

This entry was posted on September 20, 2010 at 6:59 am and is filed under Taxes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.