Not Enough “Rich” to Cover the Deficit

Barack Obama would have us believe that if the "rich" would just pay their fair share our economic woes would disappear. History tells us that the opposite approach – lowering the tax burden on everyone, including higher earners –  is the real path to economic growth and higher tax revenues.

With all of Barack Obama's overblown rhetoric about the "rich" paying their fair share, what effect (other than making it more difficult for job-creators to add to their staffs) would higher taxes have on reducing deficits?

• Those earning more than $10 million per year earned a total of $240 billion in 2009. That would fund federal government operations for a mere 18 days.
• If every dime earned by taxpayers making over $1,000,000 was paid in taxes, it would still not cover the federal deficit.
• Even doubling federal income taxes for every taxpayer would fall short of a balanced budget by $400 billion.

So, let's sum up. The rich don't have the money to bring order to our budget chaos, nearly half of all "taxpayers" pay no federal income taxes at all, and a large number receive more in refunds than they had withheld in taxes.

What is the answer?

The only remaining solution is to drastically scale back Obama's Solyndra-type projects, hack away at waste in government, eliminate redundant federal bureaucracies and take a meat cleaver to whole programs that the federal government should leave to private industry.

Read the article in the Daily Mail.

http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/39534 

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.