http://www.leanleft.com/archives/2008/10/15/6841/

If you see anything that I incorrectly identify as a fact, by all means feel free to point it out.

Nonpartisan my ass!

If you have a source you think is less biased, you’re more than welcome to suggest it.

Like Sailorcurt, I noticed the exclusion of Obama’s payroll surtaxes from the presentation of his plans.

It wouldn’t make much difference to the final result. The surtax in question is a proposed 2% payroll tax for each the employer and employee on any payroll income over $250,000. So if your salary/wages amount to less than $250K, the results are unchanged. But let’s unpack that.

Suppose you have a salary of $300,000 per year. Your salary exceeds the $250,000 mark by $50,000. 2% of $50,000 is $1,000 in additional taxes. Add another $1,000 for the company’s share, and you get a whopping $2,000 in additional taxes on a $300,000 income. Holy Redistribution of Wealth, Batman!

Corporate taxes are a tax that CEOs and CFOs decide how to distribute between employees (in pay rates, bonuses, layoffs, etc.), shareholders (dividends), and customers (prices).

You know, that could just as easily be flipped around. When you cut corporate taxes, the CEOs and CFOs decide how to distribute the tax savings among employees, shareholders, and customers. If you think the bulk of that savings is going to go anywhere other than the shareholders, we can start discussing that Alaskan bridge again.

Corporate taxes are a ‘regressive’ impact that in this type of graph would show up mainly on the three lower quintiles.

That may very well be the most asinine argument I’ve heard in a very long time. How the hell do you figure that works? To buy that, you basically have to think that cutting $1 of Wal-Mart’s taxes would have a greater benefit to Joe Sixpack (the plumber?) than cutting $1 of Joe Sixpack’s taxes would. In either case, you’ve collected $1 less revenue. But to whom does that additional $1 make a bigger difference? Your argument says that the $1 saved by Wal-Mart notices the extra $1 more than Joe Sixpack does. That doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Of course Joe’s going to be more impacted if he gets the tax cut directly, as opposed to indirectly through a corporation with which he may not even do any business…

Finally, all of this is essentially moving the goal posts anyway, because Uncle’s argument that taxes wouldn’t be lower “for anyone” under Obama’s plan has been thoroughly eviscerated.

P.S. What part of the Urban link was supposed to convince me that they’re not nonpartisan? The part where they self-identify as nonpartisan in the very first paragraph?

Comment crossed at Lean Left.

Nonpartisan my ass! Can you seriously say you looked at http://urban.org/about/index.cfm, or even read the opening of the PDF, and think it’s nonpartisan?

Like Sailorcurt, I noticed the exclusion of Obama’s payroll surtaxes from the presentation of his plans.

Like Chris, I noticed that corporate taxes are excluded from the presentations, which are a huge difference in the plans. Corporate taxes are a tax that CEOs and CFOs decide how to distribute between employees (in pay rates, bonuses, layoffs, etc.), shareholders (dividends), and customers (prices). Most of us are customers and employees, and everyone with a 401K that invests in companies that pay American taxes is a shareholder.

Corporate taxes are a ‘regressive’ impact that in this type of graph would show up mainly on the three lower quintiles. Of course, since the exact numbers are based on individual corporate decisions and indidivial consumer’s buying, it would be impossible to include any firm number for them.

The funny thing is that Devich isn’t incorporated if he is self employed (sort of like “Joe the Plumber” it seems). I guess it depends on what Devich does (PCs are different from INCs), but the tax code is completely on the side of small business people from the start.

If you’ve got a take-home income of $70,000 on a gross income of $200,000, you need to get an accountant. And if you have one, fire him and get another one. Assuming a gross income of $200,000, and assuming you don’t itemize, and assuming that you’re married, filing jointly and have no kids, your taxable income after the standard deduction ($10,700) and personal exemptions ($6,800) is $182,500. On that income, your federal income tax bill is $40,092.50. Your self-employment tax, at 15.1% of the first $92,350 of each of your incomes, tops out at $14,130, for a total federal tax bill of $54,222.50, an effective tax rate of 27.1% — a far cry from the 75% figure you cited; that leaves you with an after-tax income of $145,777.50. So you’re going to have to enlighten me as to where the other $75,777.50 went. Looks to me like you paid 2.5 times as much tax as you should have, if your numbers are correct (which, by the way, they don’t appear to be — where does the second 30% come from?).

And mind you, that $54,222.50 is the worst-case tax scenario. Through itemized deductions, you could almost certainly reduce that. And you could probably also claim that

As to what the 15.1% self-employment tax is, it’s a tax that people who aren’t self-employed also pay — the FICA tax. Employees half, and employers pay the other half. If you’re self-employed (as I once was), you’re both the employer and the employee, so you get the double whammy.

On estimated taxes, everybody who pays income taxes pays estimated taxes. That’s what the withholding is out of most people’s paychecks every week. And if, in a regular job where somebody else is your employer, you withhold too little throughout the year and wind up owing a large chunk, you are penalized 10% for this — it has nothing whatsoever to do with being self-employed. It just means more paperwork for the self-employed, because you’re in charge of your own estimation and withholding, rather than having someone do it for you.

Finally, I defy you to get a job working at McDonald’s where your after-tax income is $70,000 per year. Short of owning your own franchise (which puts you back in the self-employed column again), you’re not going to sniff anything like that kind of money. BOTH of you could get general manager’s positions, and you STILL would have a hard time combining to get $70,000 in after-tax income.

Look, everyone hates paying taxes, but taxes are the price we pay to live in a civil society. And for whatever reason, most people seem to grossly overestimate how much they actually pay in taxes. (Your 75% estimate is just plain laughable.)

Laughingdog:

You make the same mistake I complained about above: not paying federal income taxes is not the same thing as not paying any taxes.

“Conservatives seem to assume that if you don’t pay taxes on April 15th, and instead get a rebate, than you don’t pay taxes.”

That’s a pretty ridiculous assumption.

I see you’re fond of stereotypes as long as they aren’t being applied to a racial group. When I was putting myself through college, struggling by on the meager (at the time) G.I. Bill, I actually had such a small income that I got back every penny of my withholding to both Virginia and the Feds AND got even more money from the Earned Income Credit.

I’d also like to point out that the “Conservatives” are basing that “1/3 don’t pay taxes” on actual numbers (otherwise known as “facts”) from IRS future projections, as well as from past data.

http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/1410.html

“Bottom line: If you’re not in the top 10%, your taxes will go down, and if you’re not in the top 1%, your taxes won’t go up. Further, if you’re in the bottom four quintiles, your taxes will be lower under Obama’s plan than they are under currently, and lower than they would be under McCain’s plan.”

Bullpucky.

Why?

These tax plans assume people won’t act to reduce their tax burden.

So we won’t really know the result until 2010 at the earliest. But we can know something now. No matter who he has to tax to fund his programs, Obama isn’t going to cut his agenda one single bit.

We make about $200,000 a year. After taxes, that’s about $70,000 a year. Why again did we bother going to post-graduate school? I could go back to working at McDonald’s and have better hours and less taxes. Seriously, it doesn’t pay to be self-employed anymore. If Obama thinks taxing people who make more than $200,000 is going to help me, then I don’t want his help.

If your rebate is equal to or greater than what you paid in during the year, then you didn’t pay Federal Income Taxes. Under the EIC system, you receive a rebate based on how much you would have gotten back had you made a certain amount based on you and your family up to $40,000. Based off of that refund, it’s not hard to pay little or no taxes.

So, an even larger percentage will get more back in taxes than they paid or pay little or none while bilking those who made more than $250K.

Anyone w/ any basic sense will recognize that whoever is making that amount + will start charging more for whatever they’re doing to earn those high figures and that WILL trickle down in the form of higher costs and/or job cuts. Just like the minimum wage hike in IL did.

I make no mistakes about it… I myself fit into that category. I am a father of 3 with a stay home wife, I am a part time college student and I make under $35,000 a year.

I am looking at my paycheck right now. For one week, Fed Tax = 0, Medicare = $15.01, Fica = $64.22, State tax = $33… So total per year = $2059.98 in taxes to the fed and $858 to the state.

Now, my tax return from last year is as follows. Federal refund of over $5,000, state refund of over $1,250.

Under an Obama plan, I would indeed get even more back than what I do now.

But…

The guy that owns my company would get MUCH less, and that might be enough for him to decide that my job position was no longer critical to the continuing operation of his company.

So the choice becomes obvious. I vote for the person that is less likely to make my boss need to cut jobs, that man is McCain.

Of course I couldnt vote for Barack Gunban Obama anyways, but that is an aside.

Now, frankly, I doubt highly that Obama is going to pass his middle class tax credit, or whatever it is, so I’ll assume that my taxes probably won’t be effected…and quite frankly, I’d be fine with a small tax increase if necessary to pay down the debt.

The two charts in the middle that purport to show information on the relative tax rates looks very contrived to me. Perhaps it’s just my ignorance…I’m no economist…but when any report or study starts using terms like “Tax Units” and percentages of “tax units” (I sort of was under the impression that the standard unit for taxation was “dollars”, just like every other economic transaction) red flags start popping up all over he place in my mind. How were these “tax units” determined? Was this just a matter of using some sort of intellectual and mathematical gymnastics to create a set of numbers that reach a predetermined outcome?

I can’t really say, but it sure looks suspicious to me.

BTW: What, exactly, is this “Payroll surtax” that they declined to include in Obama’s plans? Does that mean that there is an aspect of Obama’s plan that they simply left out to get the numbers they wanted?

As I said…red flags popping up everywhere.

At any rate, who will get what after the Obamassiah redistributes the nation’s income as he sees fit does not alleviate the blatant and unapologetic socialistic undertones of his “spreading the wealth around” plan.

It is simply not the role of government to decide who is worthy to keep what percentage of what they earn. Taxes are intended to finance the government, not to socially engineer the populace…Obama’s plan (and probably McCain’s plan to a lesser degree, BTW) will be a disaster for our economy and, as a direct result, for the world economy.

All hands, stand by for heavy rolls.

You make a common but annoying mistake: You confuse not paying any income taxes with not paying any taxes at all. You’re forgetting the regressive FICA taxes, for example.

Uncle:

Huh? The report I cite shows how much people will pay in taxes as compared to current law, and shows that the overwhelming majority of taxpayers will pay less under Obama’s plan than under current law or under McCain’s plan. How does that constitute me saying “but McCain?”

And you’ll forgive me if I don’t accept the WSJ’s ultra-right-wing editorial page as a reasonable source of information about the two competing tax plans. Although I must admit some amusement by the newspeak that says that anything that results in you paying less taxes but isn’t a marginal rate cut does not constitute a “tax cut.”

The WSJ disagrees.

of course that group is also the most likely to be unemployed when the taxes are raised on the people that own the businesses that they work for, but that’s ok, the messiah will take care of them.