Playing with fire

The Tax Foundation: Tax burden of top 1% now exceeds that of the bottom 95%[*1] :

IRS data shows that in 2007—the most recent data available—the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 40.4 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. This is the highest percentage in modern history. By contrast, the top 1 percent paid 24.8 percent of the income tax burden in 1987, the year following the 1986 tax reform act.

. . . the bottom 95 percent paid 39.4 percent of the income tax burden. This is down from the 58 percent of the total income tax burden they paid twenty years ago.

To put this in perspective, the top 1 percent is comprised of just 1.4 million taxpayers and they pay a larger share of the income tax burden now than the bottom 134 million taxpayers combined.

Some in Washington say the tax system is still not progressive enough. However, the recent IRS data bolsters the findings of an OECD study released last year showing that the U.S.—not France or Sweden—has the most progressive income tax system among OECD nations. We rely more heavily on the top 10 percent of taxpayers than does any nation and our poor people have the lowest tax burden of those in any nation.

This is all well and good until the 1% decide to stop paying taxes. And they are quite capable of doing so, and doing quite nicely while doing it, thank you very much.

If you don’t have any “skin in the game,” you’re not likely to take the game very seriously. That’s just human nature. That’s why people vote Democrat–they don’t take the “game” of fiscal responsibility seriously. The first five months of the Obama Administration and a Democrat stranglehold on the Congress make that perfectly clear to everyone.

Passing thousand-page bills spending hundreds of billions of dollars without even bothering to read them is proof enough that Democrats simply don’t take government seriously, and they don’t take taxpayers seriously.

Taxpayers, on the other hand, are taking all of this increasingly seriously, and if the Democrats aren’t careful, this could get really ugly really fast.

Time for the Democrats to curl up with a good book. Atlas Shrugged[*2] . (You can skip over the John Galt speech. though–everybody does.)