“Almost nobody says we should have the richest pay the least. And yet when we look around the country, the vast majority of states have tax systems that do just that.”
Nearly every state and local tax system in the U.S. is fueling the nation’s inequality crisis by forcing lower- and middle-class families to contribute a larger share of their incomes than their rich counterparts, according to a new study published Tuesday.
Titled Who Pays?, the analysis by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) examines in detail the tax systems of all 50 U.S. states, including the rates paid by different income segments.
In 41 states, ITEP found, the richest 1% are taxed at a lower rate than any other income group. Forty-six states tax the top 1% at a lower rate than middle-income families.
When I was a kid my parents rented a VHS movie called Kid President or something like that.
It was about a kid who wrote to a sitting president who wasn’t doing well in his re-election campaign, and the president started to replace his own policies with what the kid suggested in his letters, these changes were obviously wildly popular with the public.
Anyways, in the movie the kid’s tax policy was to reduce your taxes the richer you got, as a reward for doing well, and to motivate the poor people to work harder so they’d have to pay less money in taxes.
Who would have guessed every republican would’ve also seen this film and taken it to heart?
Grover Norquist came up with his tax pledge in like second grade. All of their ideas are elementary school level analysis.