Among the many proposals to raise taxes and cut and reallocate government spending to regain our country's economic health, one of the most sensitive is decreasing the tax deductibility of charitable contributions. The independent Congressional Budget Office recently reviewed 11 options for revising the income tax treatment of charitable giving, and it grouped them into four categories. All establish a floor below which contributions would not be deductible. One proposal retained tax deductibility only for donations exceeding $1,000 per couple or, alternatively, 2 percent of a person's adjusted gross income. Under this example, the report estimated that individuals who itemize deductions would pay $15.7 billion in additional taxes yearly to the government.
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) tracks effective tax rates by income group, combining income taxes, payroll taxes, federal excise (sales) taxes, and corporate taxes. Projections by organizations like Citizens for Tax Justice show that the Bush tax cuts are heavily weighted with benefits for the very wealthy, like the full repeal of the estate tax that will kick in just before the tax cuts are supposedly due to expire in 2010.
The president had intended to raise money for health care by limiting the income-tax deductions that wealthy taxpayers can claim. According to the Congressional Budget Office, taxing them would yield a whopping $246 billion every year. The good news is that a program providing universal health care doesn't need the full $246 billion a year generated if every employee now receiving tax-free health benefits had to start paying taxes on them.
The rich did indeed get richer under President George W. Bush, but they also paid an ever-larger share of the federal tax burden, according to new numbers compiled by Congress' chief scorekeeper. After dipping in the early part of the Bush administration, by 2007 the top quintile of earners - the 20 percent who made the most - paid nearly 70 percent of all the taxes that the federal government collected, according to Congressional Budget Office figures. That includes a staggering 86 percent of the income tax being paid by just the top quintile of earners.
WASHINGTON - The richest 1 percent of Americans have been getting far richer over the last three decades while the middle class and poor have seen their after-tax household income only crawl up in comparison, according to a government study. After-tax income for the top 1 percent of U.S. households almost tripled, up 275 percent, from 1979 to 2007, the Congressional Budget Office found. Meanwhile, for people in the middle of the economic scale, after-tax income grew by just 40 percent, and those at the bottom experienced an 18 percent increase.
For 18 consecutive years the Tax Foundation has published an estimate of the combined state-local tax burden shouldered by the residents of each of the 50 states. For each state, we calculate the total amount paid by the residents in taxes, and we divide those taxes by the total income in each state to compute a "tax burden" measure. In 2008, the residents of three states stand above the rest, paying the highest state-local tax burdens in the nation: New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. They are the only three states where taxpayers give up more than 11% of their income in state-local taxes. Alaskans pay the least, 6.4% in 2008, but Nevada is close at 6.6%. In four states - Wyoming, Florida, New Hampshire and South Dakota - the residents pay between 7% and 8% of their income in state-l...
... done by such organizations as the Congressional Budget Office and the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy C...
Would you be willing to give up all of your tax deductions - state and local taxes, mortgage interest, church and charitable contributions, etc. - in exchange for sharply lower tax rates? With the return of Congress, the debate is about to begin again. One major obstacle to tax reform is the confusion in the minds of most Americans (and many members of Congress) about average versus marginal tax rates. Your average tax rate is the percentage of your total income that you paid in taxes, and your marginal tax rate is the rate you paid on your last dollar of income. The current federal tax rates range from 10 percent to 35 percent (the marginal rates). However, according to a new Congressional Budget Office study, effective tax rates range from less than 3 percent for the bottom half of in...
Households worth more than $1 million a year received bigger federal tax cuts from President Bush's tax overhaul than any group in the country, according to a New York Times report based on study by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office. Overall, the president's tax cuts reduced rates for people at every income level, but most significantly for the top 1 percent of earners, according to The New York Times.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush's tax cuts since 2001 have shifted more of the tax burden from the nation's rich to middle- class families, according to a study released Friday by the Congressional Budget Office. The tax rate declined across all income levels - but more so in the top brackets, the report said.
While many studies explore the fairness of taxes and government spending across income groups, few studies explore the distribution of tax burdens and government spending across age groups in the United States. Official projections from the Congressional Budget Office and others warn that federal spending for old-age entitlement programs is on an unsustainable long-term path due to the growing number of elderly Americans collecting federal transfer payments and the shrinking pool of American workers available to pay payroll taxes that finance those programs. As a result, Americans face hard choices in coming decades between sharply higher payroll taxes on young workers, steep cuts in Social Security and Medicare to the elderly, or some combination of the two. In total, the nation's tax ...
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