Romney could have made those statements in a better and more clear fashion, but at the end of the day he is right. Almost half do not pay taxes on their Adjusted Gross Income.
Is important to point out Adjusted Gross Income because that is the base that establishes who pay taxes and who does not. It is a given that those who are employees receiving weekly or biweekly checks pay payroll taxes. Part of those payroll taxes are Social Security and Medicare. You cannot get a tax refund on those monies and are not part of your Adjusted Gross Income. So you may ask why am I pointing that out, because that's is how the data in the report is skewed. The article points out that of all the Americans who did not pay federal income taxes in 2011 that 61% were employed and had payroll taxes that they paid. The author makes the argument that they are federal taxpayers and that's true to a point. But they try to mislead you is comparing the Social Security and Medicaid tax to Romney's personal income tax. Talk about spin.
Here is the reality. everything you pay in payroll taxes percentage is based on your gross income. Working Americans pay approximately 15% of their income to Social Security and Medicare, All people with income have to make this payment. Now it is tax time, the time were every American tries to bring their tax liability to the lowest that they can make it and anybody who denies it is lying. Nobody starts filling out those forms screaming I want to pay as much as I can. At the end there is a bottom-line dollar, is only three possible results, you owe money and have to make a payment, you're going to get a refund because you overpaid, or you paid no taxes at all. This is the category where the statistics are used to determine the percentage of taxpayers and the percentage who aren't taxpayers.So the guy who paid no income tax when he filed the end of the year has no Adjusted Gross Income tax liability but did pay 15% of his gross salary in taxes for Medicaid and Social Security, and so according to the author is a taxpayer. So let's compare that to Mitt Romney, According to the tax return he released he paid approximately 14% on his adjusted gross income of $22 million. In addition like everybody else he paid his payroll taxes of 15% on Social Security and Medicare meaning Mitt Romney paid a total of 37% in taxes on his gross income. The article left out that part when trying to compare the two. Talk about misleading.
The reality is the 47% did not pay taxes into the general fund which pays for entitlements and everything else. Romney paid 14% more than they did.
The problems economically today have nothing to do with what Reagan and Bush did with their tax cuts. They eased the burden on the middle class and now you want to fault them for it. When the Bush tax cuts were enacted, in 2003 the tax revenues for this country were only $1.7 trillion, they jumped the very next year and continued going up. In Bush's last year in office revenues were $2.523 trillion. The tax cuts did just what they were supposed to do raise revenues, The problem was Congress and the spending spree they went on with increased revenues. Just for the record revenues have dropped first year Obama took office and have not reached the levels they were under President Bush.Not to mention the drastically increased spending spree those occurred during this administration.
I don't believe taxi increases or tax cuts are the right answer right now. I think there has to be a serious attempt to stop spending, and to go through the whole budget and honestly remove all fraud and waste. And Obama says there's no more cuts they can be made but please, no more pain $15 million per year to study the mating habits of bees, $800 for toilet seat,, government departments doing duplicate work, as a whole lot more I can list, it truly truly do that first, there's no true way to know if we have the ability to give a tax cut, or if there would be a need to raise taxes.
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