I was doing a search tonight and somehow stumbled upon this article: Taxed Enough Already?. It's on the Pew Research Center website and it highlights recent polling data that 50% of Americans say they pay a fair share of taxes. The article goes on and on with a lot of numbers discussing the irony of this in light of the Tea Party movement and current outrage at the federal government. The author seems to be trying hard to make the point that we don't really mean what we say.
So 50% of Americans believe they are paying their fair share of taxes? Sounds shocking I know. But what about that 47% of Americans who don't pay taxes? Seems like there might be a little crossover there. I mean, I guess some of those folks might not be able to do the math and maybe they feel like they pay too much, but my guess is that they feel pretty good about their current taxation situation. So maybe there is a whopping 3% in the mix that believes they are getting what they pay for. Then again, that's probably within the margin of error so you could argue that there are no actual taxpayers in America who feel they are getting what they pay for.
I wonder what our current situation would look like if you had to pay taxes to vote.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Happy About Taxes?
Posted by Julie at 11:55 PM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
There are several core issues here: Most Americans haven't a clue what they get for their taxes, save a huge bureaucracy and a, I'll be generous here, a befuddled, well perhaps not that generous, self-aggrandizing and self-enright Congressional branch.
A poll tax is a perfectly dreadful idea and one that was outlawed constitutionally in 1964 by the 24th Amendment. That tax was used most frequently to preclude the black population from voting in the south.
Post a Comment