Taxes/Dept (Family Budget)

Why the "family budget" analogy fails: “Tighten our belts”—an awful analogy: Beware simple, folksy metaphors that emanate wisdom but convey exactly the wrong message. My candidate for the most destructive of all is that old saw about deficit reduction: “Hey, families have to tighten their belts when things get tough…government should too...Sounds right, but it’s totally backwards. When the economy stumbles and family income stumbles with it, then sure, families have to tighten up. But this is precisely why government has to loosen its belt. That’s the whole point of countercyclical policy: When the private sector is contracting, the public sector temporarily expands, and vice versa. The analogy is wrong on both ends: When the private sector is humming along, and working families can maybe loosen their belts a bit, that’s when the government needs to tighten its belt."..http://www.democracyjournal.org/23/rethinking-the-debt.php?page=3

‎"So if you widened the lens beyond direct federal taxes — to all taxes, including indirect, state and local taxes — the conclusion would likely be similar. Mr. Romney does not pay a lower tax rate than most Americans. He also doesn’t pay a much higher tax rate, despite being much more affluent." http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/more-on-romneys-tax-rate-and-everyone-elses/

‎"...taxes in the United States are quite low today, compared with past years or those in other countries. Most important, American taxes are not sufficient to pay for the programs that many people want, like Medicare, Social Security, road construction and education subsidies." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/us/politics/why-americans-think-the-tax-rate-is-high-and-why-theyre-wrong.html?_r=1

The case for higher taxes: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/27/the-case-for-higher-taxes/ 

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/cutting-the-corporate-tax-rate-is-no-economic-panacea/ 

"It is not class warfare to suggest that the richest 1 percent of people in society pay one-third of their income to the federal government, as they did under Ronald Reagan. Keep in mind that dividends were taxable as ordinary income every year of his administration, and in the Tax Reform Act of 1986 he supported taxing capital gains as ordinary income as well." http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/what-the-rich-can-afford-in-income-tax/ 

Zuckerberg's Effective Tax Rate: 7.6% http://www.tax.com/taxcom/taxblog.nsf/Permalink/MSUN-8R7LKQ?OpenDocument

 

Thanks in part to federal tax breaks, corporations paid out just 12.1 percent of their 2011 profits in taxes, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That's well below the country's top marginal corporate tax rate of 35 percent -- and as The Wall Street Journal notes, it's the lowest percentage corporations have paid since 1972. During the two previous decades, a period that included the economic prosperity of the 1990s and the housing boom of the George W. Bush administration, corporations were paying an average percentage almost twice as high. The CBO's numbers undercut a popular conservative claim -- that the United States places a higher tax burden on its corporations than almost any other first-world nation -- and arrive at a time when national politicians are engaged in a fierce rhetorical battle over how much wealthy institutions and individuals should pay to the government.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/03/corporate-profits-tax_n_1253007.html