Thursday, April 15, 2010

Tax Day: The Reality of Class Warfare

As the Tea Party ramps up its Tax Day protests around the country, I'd like to introduce some facts and reality to the equation.

As the graph on the right shows (courtesy of the geniuses at
WolframAlpha), the average federal tax rate in 2007 was 12.84%, a far cry from the 40% the median Tea Partier believes the rate to be.

The bar chart, however, paints an even more telling picture. How have the ultra wealthy (those making more than $2M annually) changed our tax system from PROgressive to REgressive? If this is proof of blatant class warfare, I don't know what is...


To quote Warren Buffett:

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Also, as he said at a $4,600-a-seat Hillary Clinton fundraiser in 2007:

“The 400 of us [here] pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

Is that the type of country we want America to be?