The Senate is expected to pass today the Conference Comittee report making the latest Republican tax-shift law. H.R. 4297 was already passed by the House in December, and a Senate version passed in February. The Conference report resolving differnces in those bills passed the House yesterday. The Senate parlimentarian has ruled that the reconciliation bill before the Senate today is not subject to filibuster. So the tax-shift will become law.
Now, I know you're probably thinking, "Spare me the complex analysis, the legislative history, the explanations of the AMT." You want the bottom line. "How much," you're asking, "will my typical wealthy elite capitalist family benefit from over a trillion dollars being added to the deficit which will have to be repaid by poor saps who actually have to do honest work for a living?"
Well, you've come to the right place. I've got the numbers below the fold.
How Big is Your Share of the Take? asks Mark Thoma today. And he's got some interesting tables there, from the
Tax Policy Center.
The first one (shown above) shows the average tax-shift by income level. You can look up and see exactly how much you and your family wil be getting. Be sure to look up how big your haul is, as I'll be giving a quiz on this in the end.
He also points out:
Here's another piece from the tables, the change in the average federal tax rate due to the proposed legislation:
Income (Thousands) |
Change in Average
Federal Tax Rate |
Less than 10 |
0.0 |
10-20 |
0.0 |
20-30 |
0.0 |
30-40 |
-0.1 |
40-50 |
-0.1 |
50-75 |
-0.2 |
75-100 |
-0.5 |
100-200 |
-1.0 |
200-500 |
-1.6 |
500-1,000 |
-0.8 |
More than 1,000 |
-1.4 |
All |
-0.7 |
In his typically understated way, he lets the numbers speak for themselves. But, just to make it clear, I thought I'd point out that this is not a tax-shift wherein "the weathy get more because they pay more." No, the numbers make clear this is something else. The wealthy get a much larger rate cut. The average shift in the rate for those making over $100,000 is 10 times as large as those around the median, in the $30,000-$50,000 range. For those earning over a million a year it's 14 times as large. And these are the differences in the rate, not dollars. The dollar diffences are much larger.
In dollars, the average shift for those in the $100,000 to $200,000 range is 82 times that for those in the $30,000 to $40,000 range. For those making $200,000 to $500,000, it's 266 times as large. For those making over a million, it's 2,515 times as large.
More tables are available here. Therre's also additional coverage of the bill in the NY Times here and here. And the article linked to by Thoma here.
One thing I found interesting in the first two Times articles:
"These were not wise choices or even fair choices for the American people," said Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee.
On Wednesday, Senator Max Baucus of Montana, the senior Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said Democrats had tried, but failed, to persuade the Senate parliamentarian that the bill violated those rules and should thus be subject to the filibuster's 60-vote threshold.
The puzzling thing is, the vote I linked to above says Baucus voted for the underlying bill in February. As did Cantwell (D-WA), Carper (D-DE), Clinton (D-NY), Dayton (D-MN), Feinstein (D-CA), Johnson (D-SD), Landrieu (D-LA), Lincoln (D-AR), Menendez (D-NJ), Nelson (D-FL), Nelson (D-NE), Pryor (D-AR), Rockefeller (D-WV), Salazar (D-CO), Schumer (D-NY), and Stabenow (D-MI). And, in the House, 15 Democrats were for the initial bill, and 9 for the reconciliation.
In the third article, analyzing the bill, we get an estimate of the overall cost:
The official estimate of the bill's cost, on Monday, was $69 billion. But this assumed that the tax breaks would be in place for only a year or two. If they were to continue for the next decade -- which President Bush and his Republican supporters want -- the cost would be more than 15 times as great, estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, an arm of Congress, showed.
Well, 15 times $69 billion comes to $1035 billion. That's just over a trillion dollars. According to the IRS, there were 131.3 million income tax payers (FY 2004). That comes to a cost of $10,624 per tax payer. The interest on this debt, if we assume a 5% rate, would come to 51.7 billion, or $394 per year for each tax payer.
Please note that the poll below only concerns your short term benefit from the tax-shift, it is, like the Congress, not concerned with what happens when the bill is paid.