Is 50 cents tax on what your earn and keep fair? Read today’s issue review.
One of the questions that should be asked and addressed next week at the debate is what is fair share? This has been a major issue in the campaign and today we’ll take a quick look at both campaign’s positioning on this.
Let’s start with the President’s side since the Democrats have made “fair share” a major campaign issue. The argument is simply that those that have need to pay more to help others. The President refers to “millionaires and billionaires” and classifieds them as those households with income of $250,000 and above. The first question you have to decide is if that household income meets your criteria of people who need to pay more.
The Romney campaign position on taxes is that they want to lower rates on every income level. To assure that high income individuals do not gain from this they propose cutting deductions from higher income levels to “assure their contributions do not reduce”. What deductions? That is unclear.
Okay so what is fair share tax levels on people? Here are the current rates:
| Tax Bracket | Married Filing Jointly | Single |
|---|---|---|
| 10% Bracket | $0 – $17,400 | $0 – $8,700 |
| 15% Bracket | $17,400 – $70,700 | $8,700 – $35,350 |
| 25% Bracket | $70,700 – $142,700 | $35,350 – $85,650 |
| 28% Bracket | $142,700 – $217,450 | $85,650 – $178,650 |
| 33% Bracket | $217,450 – $388,350 | $178,650 – $388,350 |
| 35% Bracket | Over $388,350 | Over $388,350 |
So a household earning $250,000 is in the 33% federal tax bracket. That means 33 cents of every dollar is paid to the federal government at that level.
Now you must add state taxes. So if you live as an example in California the income tax rate is 9.3%
So before you consider FICA or medicare taxes you can see income taxes are 42 cents on a dollar for “millionaires and billionaires” earning $250,000. Your vote should decide if that is fair or not.
One more thing you should know about who pays taxes is this.
The top 10 percent of income earners paid 71 percent of all federal income taxes though they earned only 43 percent of all income. The bottom 50 percent paid 2 percent of income taxes but earned 13 percent of total income. As we are all aware now almost half of tax filers paid no federal income tax at all.
So here’s my questions:
Is 33 cents federal tax on each dollar fair? (It does raise to 35 cents at $388,000)
Is 43 cents income tax fair when you add state tax like California?
What does each candidate consider fair on your earned income? What do you consider fair?
One last point. No one ever mentions the other taxes you pay on the money you keep. Did you ever see your phone bill tax? Cable bill tax? Federal and state gas tax? Sales tax? When you add all the taxes up on the dollar you earn and what you keep it is over 50 cents. What is fair?
YOUR CHOICE, OUR FUTURE
If you are a married couple making approx 69K a year and you get a raise that will bring you up to 71,000 and into a 25% tax bracket. Aren’t you better off declining the raise?
No take the raise. Remember the rate you pay only increases for those dollars over the tax table. So in your question you only pay 25% on the dollars over $70,000. The rate does not go back to dollar one. It is progressive on the dollars. You pay the same rate for the first $69,000. The 25% applies to the next thousand in your question.