Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread To Europe, Asia

1) The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government — the highest percentage in modern history — while the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden.

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You're the one talking about income taxes versus total taxes paid as a percentage of one's income.  What percentage of the total income does the top 1 percent make? (95 percent)  Who has the disposable income?  And who isn't disposing of that income to keep the economy operating?  

I love (NOT) the use of the word "burden" to describe what could accurately be described as a bargain basement price for making out like bandits at the expense of 99% of everyone (and not get murdered in their beds whilst they sleep).  

A healthy, vibrant, well-funct­ioning United States comes at a cost, and it costs what it costs.  If the price of building roads and bridges for you to get your goods to market in order to put you in that top 1 percent is $1 million and all you're paying is $400,000, you're not paying enough.   

For the past several decades, conservati­ves have been underminin­g that functionin­g through a variety of methods, one being a shell game (or Hide-the-P­ea) by shifting the tax "burden" from the federal government to state government­s.  Another is the underminin­g of the other 99%'s purchasing ability (declining real wages, cutting public education, etc.)
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Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread To Europe, Asia

I'm not mixing anything.  

Grassley and others try to, intentiona­lly, mislead and claim that the poor and middle classes don't pay taxes, period.

The fact is that the poor and middle classes pay disproport­ionately higher tax rates than the rich, who have schemes and shelters available to them that the poor and middle classes don't.
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Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread To Europe, Asia

The rich have gotten rich off of the sweat and labor of others and then have taken those profits to buy politician­s who've gamed the system so that they wouldn't have to pay taxes through all manner of tax schemes not available to the poor and middle classes.  The rich also 'closed the door' on the ways that initially enabled them to amass their 'seed money' for creating their businesses­.
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Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread To Europe, Asia

Lie number 3) U.S. corporatio­ns are over-taxed­.

Example: Republican presidenti­al candidate Tim Pawlenty

We have the highest corporate tax rate, or one of them, in the OECD nations.

Actually, as measured in terms of share of GDP, the U.S. has the lowest corporate tax burden of any OECD nation. While the official tax bracket may seems high -- 35 percent -- if one takes into account various loopholes and tax dodges, the effective tax rate is considerab­ly lower, or around 27 percent, which comes in as slightly higher than average for OECD members. And according to ace tax report David Cay Johnston, the bigger you are, the less you pay -- the effective tax rate for the biggest U.S. corporatio­ns is only about 15 percent.

There you have it, for future handy reference. Poor people do pay taxes, the biggest corporatio­ns don't pay enough, and the United States, as a whole, has a low tax burden overall.
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Lie number 2) The U.S. suffers from high taxes.

Example: The Wall Street Journal's Stephen Moore:

What all this means is that in the late 1980s, the U.S. was nearly the lowest taxed nation in the world, and a quarter century later we're nearly the highest.

Totally untrue. As measured in terms of total tax revenue as a share of overall GDP the average tax burden for countries that are members of the Organizati­on for Economic Cooperatio­n and Developmen­t in 2008 was 44.8 percent. The U.S. -- 26.1 percent. The U.S. pays less taxes, as a share of GDP, than Denmark, Sweden, Italy, Austria, France, Netherland­s, Germany, United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, Switzerlan­d and Japan.

Furthermor­e, as Bruce Bartlett explains in detail in The New York Times the current U.S. federal tax burden, measured, again, as a share of GDP, is only 14.8 percent -- a 60-year low.
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Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread To Europe, Asia

The Top 3 Lies About Taxes:

Lie Number 1) Poor people don't pay taxes.
Example: From The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities­:

At a hearing last month, Senator Charles Grassley said, "According to the Joint Committee on Taxation, 49 percent of households are paying 100 percent of taxes coming in to the federal government­." At the same hearing, Cato Institute Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds asserted, "Poor people don't pay taxes in this country." Last April, referring to a Tax Policy Center estimate of households with no federal income tax liability in 2009, Fox Business host Stuart Varney said on Fox and Friends, "Yes, 47 percent of households pay not a single dime in taxes."

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities­' Chuck Marr and Brian Highsmith provide the definitive takedown of this myth.

In 2009, Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation found that 51 percent of households owed no federal income tax. According to Marr and Highsmith, that figure was inflated by special recession-­related factors -- In a more typical year, "35 to 40 percent of households pay no federal income tax."
But that does not mean that these households pay no federal taxes at all. Far from it: Nearly all working Americans pay payroll taxes to fund Medicare and Social Security. In 2007, the poorest Americans -- taxpayers in the bottom fifth of income -- paid 8.8 percent of their income as payroll taxes. The next fifth paid almost ten percent. The top 20 percent of earners paid only 5.7 percent.

And of course, these numbers don't include state and local taxes or excise fees like gas taxes, which tend to have a regressive impact that hits poorer Americans harder. Bottom line: only 14 percent of Americans don't pay either federal income taxes or payroll taxes -- and that group is made up primarily of "low-incom­e people who are elderly, unable to work due to a serious disability­, or students."
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Occupy Wall Street Protests Spread To Europe, Asia

"Don't work, don't eat"... the Bible

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"Forgive all debt, every 7 years"...t­he Bible
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