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Of the 47 percent who didn't pay income tax in 2009, more than 60 percent of them paid payroll taxes, because they had a job. 22 percent of them were old people. 190,000 of them were soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq that year.
(from link above)
A map put out by the Tax Foundation of the 10 states with the highest and lowest percentage of filers with no federal tax liability shows that the states with the highest percentage of non-filers are, by-and-large, states that typically vote Republican, while the 10 states with the lowest percentage of non-filers tend to be Democratic-leaning.
Mitt Romney told a group of donors in a surreptitiously taped private fundraiser that voters who back President Obama are "entitled" and "dependent on government."
Romney seems to be referring to the estimated 47 percent of Americans who did not owe federal income taxes in 2011 because their incomes were so low that they qualified for a tax credit, or because they didn't work at all. Last year, 22 percent of people who didn't owe income taxes were elderly people on Social Security, and an additional 17 percent were students, disabled people or the unemployed. More than 60 percent of the group were low-income workers, many of whom qualified for the child tax credit or the earned income tax credit. (These workers did pay payroll taxes for Social Security and other programs.)
Originally posted by benrl
Does anyone still think it matters which of these two clowns are elected.
As long as Americans continue to chose one of the two offered up choices on a platter nothing will change, ever.
Nearly half of American tax filers will pay no federal income taxes this year, according to data released by the Tax Policy Center. Some 76 million tax filers, or 46.4 percent of the total, will be exempt from federal income tax in 2011. But with the help of the government, a similar percentage of filers -- many of them among the bottom 40 percent of earners -- have legally avoided paying federal income tax for the past several years.
More than half the filers exempt from federal income tax in 2011 are in the lowest income quintile, meaning they make less than 80 percent of the country. As Bruce Bartlett at The New York Times notes, those in the bottom quintile have incomes of less than $16,812.
There are 40.7 million nonpayers in this group -- about 93.3 percent of the quintile, and 53.6 percent of all nonpayers overall. Nonpayers are well represented in the second-lowest quintile, as well: That group includes 22.2 million filers who won’t pay federal income taxes this year. This is 60.3 percent of the quintile and 29.2 percent of the total number of nonpayers.
The phenomenon of low-earning Americans escaping the federal income tax burden isn't a new one. In 2002, The Wall Street Journal coined the term "lucky duckies" to describe people who were exempt from income tax because they didn't make enough money.
The phenomenon of low-earning Americans escaping the federal income tax burden isn't a new one. In 2002, The Wall Street Journal coined the term "lucky duckies" to describe people who were exempt from income tax because they didn't make enough money.
The Republican challenger speaks an uncomfortable truth — that it's hard enough to beat an incumbent president without almost half the electorate feeling dependent on him for some kind of government benefit.