{"id":2419,"date":"2014-04-14T14:57:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T14:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/closer_look_at_tax_day\/"},"modified":"2021-03-09T08:21:35","modified_gmt":"2021-03-09T08:21:35","slug":"closer_look_at_tax_day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/closer_look_at_tax_day\/","title":{"rendered":"Closer look at Tax Day – National Consumers League"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"\"<\/a>By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director<\/strong><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Tomorrow is Tax Day. People resent the Internal Revenue Service because they take your money. Republican candidate for president Mike Huckabee said during a 2008 candidates debate, \u201cPeople would love to see the IRS abolished. The harder you work, the more you earn, the more the IRS and the government wants from you.\u201d That\u2019s called \u201cthe progressive taxation\u201d system. The more money you make, the more you can pay.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

Seems fair to me. So I\u2019m not of the Huckabee school \u2013 I much prefer this quote, from Progressive era Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. — and in fact, it is emblazoned on the front of the IRS building in Washington DC: \u201cTaxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.\u201d Indeed. And this is also good time to take a look at where our taxes go. Thanks to Campaign for America\u2019s Future and their \u201cNational Priorities Project\u201d for\u00a0excellent information<\/a>\u00a0on this topic. Across the United States, the average taxpayer\u00a0paid $11,715\u00a0in 2013 federal income taxes. The military received the\u00a0largest share<\/a>\u00a0that of tax payment: 27 cents on every dollar, compared to 22.5 cents for health care. Defense spending doubled from 2001 to 2011. So we\u2019ve doubled defense spending in one decade. I was surprised to see that military spending outpaced money going to support social programs, given all the griping and grumbling from conservatives about \u201centitlement programs.\u201d This means the average taxpayer paid $3,174.25 to the military in 2013. Health care received $2,662 for programs like Medicaid and the Children\u2019s Health Insurance Program. Meanwhile, only $238 went to education programs, and just $15.84 and $6.56 went to the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program and National Forest System, respectively. National Priorities has also looked at each state\u2019s average taxpayer and calculated where taxes from every state are going. These\u00a0state-by-state tax receipts\u00a0show the state with the highest average taxes paid (Connecticut, $18,988) and lowest (Mississippi, $7,402), and everything in between. Although these state receipts show the average taxpayer\u2019s contribution to the budget, Americans don\u2019t all pay taxes equally. In theory the tax code is progressive, meaning those who make more money pay higher tax rates \u2013 yet in practice that\u2019s not always the case. As Warren Buffett made famous, billionaires sometimes pay lower rates than middle-class workers. And some corporations, like Bank of America and Citigroup, have gotten away with\u00a0paying zero federal income taxes<\/a>, even when they make billions in profit. That\u2019s because the tax code is chock-full of tax breaks. Ten of the largest tax breaks that together totaled more than\u00a0$750 billion<\/a>\u00a0in tax savings in 2013\u00a0overwhelmingly benefited<\/a>\u00a0the top 1 percent of households, with 17 percent of the benefits going to those top earners. That\u2019s in part because tax deductions \u2013 one important type of tax break \u2013 are far more likely to benefit the wealthy than middle- and low-income folks, because deductions only offer savings to taxpayers who itemize deductions. Only 16 percent of households making between $25,000 and $30,000 itemize tax deductions, while nearly 100 percent of those making over $200,000 itemize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director Tomorrow is Tax Day. People resent the Internal Revenue Service because they take your money. Republican candidate for president Mike Huckabee said during a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2419"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17809,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419\/revisions\/17809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}