By the way:
1. Perry's and Gingrich's proposals would allow taxpayers to option out and stay on the current system if they so choose.
2. A flat tax is much fairer than what we currently have, where about 1/2 of us are supporting the other 1/2 who pay no income taxes.
3. The President does not institute changes to the federal tax system. They House and Senate do that. The president can advocate, but hardly ever gets his/her way without significant modification.
4. Something needs to be done, to pull us out of the death spiral.
5. The democrats are gutless and afraid to do anything, other than institute a meaningless tax increase on the wealthy. An increase that will do little to remedy our situation, but will "trickle down" to the middle class.
By the way, by the way.....I looked up the Register's article and did not find the same data you found.
By the way, by the way, by the way:
IRS: Not enough rich to cover the deficit
August 5, 2011 by Don Surber
Soak the rich, eh?
They do not have the money.
A report from the Internal Revenue Service found that the rich — 8,274 people with incomes of $10 million per year or more — earned a total of $240 billion in 2009.
Even of you confiscated every dime they earned, you would barely have enough money to cover government spending for 24 days.
Of course, about a quarter of that money already goes to the federal government for federal income. So make that 18 days.
Another 227,000 people earned $1 million or more in 2009.
Millionaires averaged taxes of 24.4% of their income — up from 23.1% in 2008.
They, too, did not earn enough money to come anywhere close to covering the annual deficits that are $1.5 trillion a year.
Barack Obama was the first president to sign a budget with a $1 trillion deficit into law.
In fact, all the taxpayers — including the ones who get a refund check bigger than the withholding taxes they paid — have the money.
From Reuters: “Total adjusted gross income reported on tax returns, measured in 2009 dollars, was $7.626 trillion, down from $8.233 trillion in 2008 and $8.989 trillion in 2007. Total adjusted gross income was up only slightly from the $7.475 trillion reported in 2001, when there were 10 million fewer taxpayers. Adjusted gross income is the amount on the last line of the front page of a Form 1040 tax return.”
Individual tax collections totaled $1,175,422,000,000 in 2009 — or 15.4% of all income.
Doubling federal income taxes for everyone would still leave us $400 billion or so shy of balancing the budget.
We must cut. We cannot afford to buy everything we want.
