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Paying More Than Our Fair Share
Posted Mar 28, 2005 |
Now
that the federal budget has been released for Fiscal
Year 2006, the
Office of
Management and Budget has updated the most
useful artifact it produces--the
historical tables. While it may seem boring to
some, I love poring over this stuff and looking at
how we've done.
While
there will be many more articles on
Stop The Buck
about this data (I live to both discover and uncover
graft), I thought I would leave you with a simple
graph. Here is the share of the federal budget that
we pay every year through income and retirement
taxes.
Notice
how our piece (the citizens' piece) of
the pie has gone steadily up from about 51% to over
82% since FY1950? Does anyone care that corporate
America has seen its share of our federal tax burden
fall from a FY1953 high of 30.5% (in FY1943, it paid
exactly half of all taxes) to 9.3% currently? In
other words, American corporations pay only 1% more
of our national tax bill than "miscellaneous" taxes
(estate, gift, excise, customs duties, etc.). Sound
fair?
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