Class warfare?

My stomach is churning. My blood is boiling. This whole situation with the national debt ceiling has me seething.

My mind skips over Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s plea from the Senate floor, that the rich pay enough, poor should pay more. Actually, “the Republican Senator argued that top income earners pay too much in taxes while the bottom 51% of Americans don't pay enough.”

And while I don’t disagree with the assertion that “everyone should have some skin in the game” and pay something, I would like the Senator to take a look at some statistics released by the Internal Revenue Service released this past April, an outrageous bit of evidence which is recalled in Bloomberg’s Business Week:

“For the 400 U.S. taxpayers with the highest adjusted gross income, the effective federal income tax rate—what they actually pay—fell from almost 30 percent in 1995 to just under 17 percent in 2007, according to the IRS. And for the approximately 1.4 million people who make up the top 1 percent of taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate dropped from 29 percent to 23 percent in 2008. It may seem too fantastic to be true, but the top 400 end up paying a lower rate than the next 1,399,600 or so.”

Here’s my issue: how is it that I ended up paying more in taxes than the top 400 taxpayers with the largest adjusted gross income? How did you end up paying more? Because chances are, if in 2007 you made over $31,800—you paid more in taxes than they did. Nearly 10% more.

Chew on that as the Congress continues to hold our good credit hostage.

Let me leave you with this, from the same Bloomburg article:

“The true effective rate for multimillionaires is actually far lower than that indicated by official government statistics. That's because those figures fail to include the additional income that's generated by many sophisticated tax-avoidance strategies. Several of those techniques involve some variation of complicated borrowings that never get repaid, netting the beneficiaries hundreds of millions in tax-free cash.”

I get the poor not being able to pay more; that's a no brainer. What I take issue with is the very wealthy paying far less than-- and profiting from-- what is left of the middle class.