From: lazarus@ocf.berkeley.edu (Andrew J. Lazarus)
Newsgroups: tx.politics,alt.politics.clinton
Subject: Re: Clinton Policies (was: Re: Legalized Theft)
Date: 11 Sep 1992 04:47:57 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley Open Computing Facility
Distribution: usa
NNTP-Posting-Host: bigbang.berkeley.edu

Sorry for math phobes, lots of numbers to follow. The good news is: we
will demolish Haugh's argument once and for all.

He began by claiming

>1). It is based on taxes paid per dollar of income earned.  That is the
>    "tax fairness" index.  The upper class pays 200+ times the amount of
>    taxes per dollar earned.
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^    NOTE - NOT per capita

I suggested that this number was completely impossible. Since the
maximum tax rate is 31%, it implies that the poor pay less than
one-fourth of a cent on the dollar in income tax.. Obviously whatever
number Haugh has in mind, it is not measured by "per dollar earned". It
must be some sort of aggregate.

Undeterred by common sense, Haugh plunged on, writing

>Surely you are not this slow.

Moi? I'm not the one who says poor people pay less than a penny on the
dollar.....

>If the top 50% of the income earned generates 97% of the income tax
>revenue (and I believe that is the correct ratio), select those two
>groups generates a ratio of 32.3 to 1.

>Example:

>Total Poor:	$1,000		$3	.3%
>Total Rich:	$1,000		$97	9.7%

>
>			9.7 / .3 = 32.3

Your premise is F A L S E. The following is excerpted from Statistical
Abstracts of the US, 1990 edition, table 511. It is the figures for 1987. But
anyway, notice how your 200 has fallen to 32.3. The correct figure, we
will see, is about 2.

In the following table (tab delimited), AGI = Adjusted Gross Income.

		Total	Income Tx
AGI	#retrns AGI	Total	Tax as a
(in $K)	(in K)	(in $M)	(in $M)	% of AGI
0--1	3,724	-27,104	96	N/A
1--3	7,423	14,861	179	3.9
3--5	6,678	26,670	429	3.5
5--7	6,413	38,360	994	4.1
7--9	6,309	50,435	1,788	5.4
9--11	5,957	59,471	2,585	6.1
11--13	5,588	67,031	3,653	6.7
13--15	5,303	74,132	4,699	7.0
15--17	4,789	76,476	5,665	7.7
17--19	4,487	80,696	6,283	8.0
19--22	5,876	120,119	10,026	8.5
22--25	5,306	124,463	11,377	9.3
25--30	7,494	205,546	20,393	10.0
30--40	11,605	402,546	42,832	10.7
40--50	7,866	350,515	41,830	11.8
50--75	8,144	485,722	70,134	14.5
75--100	2,043	173,763	31,158	18.0
100-200	1,520	201,210	43,632	21.7
200-500	432	123,965	33,203	26.8
500-1M	77	51,939	15,261	29.4
1M +	36	87,196	25,491	29.3

Those earning $40K plus are about 53% of the total national AGI and they
pay about 70% of the income tax. So the rich half pays just over twice
in income tax what the poorer half does. So much for "200 times per
dollar earned". So much for your 97/3 split -- it's 70/30 !

As you can see
from the last column, the super-rich ($1M+) pay about 5 times as much per
dollar earned as people making $10K per year. The 200 number? Obviously
made up.

I will even tell you where I think you made your mistake. The poorer
half of the *population* earned about 5% of the taxable income.
However, you are now looking at tax PER CAPITA and not PER DOLLAR
EARNED. This number, by itself, tells us nothing about tax fairness
without reference to aggregate income in the richer and poorer halves.
If you want to discuss that, fine. I think you'll find that all indices
of tax fairness corrected to "per dollar earned" grew LESS fair during
Reagan/Bush.

I notice you no longer mention anything about the Earned Income Credit.
Did you double-check and discover that it doesn't even apply to persons
without dependents?

Basically, what the hell are you talking about? It took me an hour to
type this stuff in, so do us all a favor and tell us what numbers you
are misinterpreting and where you are getting them.

andy