You are incorrect. Since 1955 though 1998, the total tax burden on the median income family, has increased from about 18% in 1955 to 41% of income in 1995 and remained relatively stable through 1998. I have not found what it has done over the past ten years, but suspect it has been relatively stable due to GWB tax cuts. You are welcome to try to back up your "pretty small range over last 5 or 6 decades if you can. If you dare, try looking at this.
taxfoundation.org/files/687490cfad2433b124d834266ce04e4e.pdf
I think you are just making stuff up out of thin air. IT HAS MORE THAN DOUBLED FROM THE MIDDLE 1950’S. THAT IS NOT A NARROW RANGE.
And PLEASE provide me some data on all these Obama tax cuts. Or maybe you are just referring to the fact that unemployed pay no income taxes…now Obama sure has helped them out.
The total tax burden in 2004 for the US was 25.5% according to Forbes, It was the 27th highest in the world.
images.forbes.com/media/2006/05/Overall_Tax_Burden_Governemt_Spending.pdf
The tax foundation numbers you cite never approach the 50 % you mentioned. And you apparently didn’t look at the data on their website too closely. If you did you would see that the tax burden, even in the concocted usage they came up with moves within a range of 5% for the last 25 years and that is even including the employer portion of SS taxes and attributing the corporate earnings to individuals.
And then the tax foundation excludes the elderly who pay very little in taxes and whose income is to a large degree made up of social security payments and medical expenses paid by medicate etc.
So the Tax Foundation front loads all the expenses, doesn’t take into account exports, doesn’t then consider the payments back of SS as refunds etc. etc.
Under their way thinking it would appear that all retired people are freeloading burdens on the rest of the taxpayers.
And if you excluded the SS taxes from your reliance on the Tax Foundation you would drop the median tax burden by about 30% or so and you would be back to the neighborhood when SS taxes were 4% of the burden and not 13+%.
Another interesting thing about the differences the tax foundation uses and others that results from their treatment of SS taxes is that the wealthy do not pay SS taxes on their income above 106,800.
Perhaps the tax foundation didn’t want to show that the steady tax burden over the last 25 years on median income earners contrasts with the decreasing effective tax burden on high income earners.
So in reality the tax burden is on the lower end of developed countries , just above Mexico in the rankings and the middle class is assuming a greater burden of the tax bill as the wealthy get their taxes cut.
That is not even discussing the defense budget which consumes about 50% of the budget outside of SS which is a self funded program.
So is your solution to stop Social Security(self funded), stop education (the largest part of the local budgets) or decrease defense spending ( the largest part of federal discretionary spending)?
Peace
