Not so mockworthy any more, those #OccupyWallStreet kids. From the Washington Post:
All told, 94,500 millionaires paid a smaller share of their income in taxes than 10 million households with moderate incomes, the report found.
Late Tuesday, Senate Republicans rejected a variation on the Buffett Rule — a 5.6 percent surtax on income over $1 million — to cover the cost of Obama’s $447 billion jobs package.Oops.
The article goes on to note that the Republican counter-argument, that millionaires pay a lot of taxes on other stuff, so it all equals out, is not at all true for a quarter of all millionaires - all 100,000 of them.
Critics initially blasted the Buffett Rule, arguing that the average millionaire already pays a significantly higher effective tax rate than middle-class families do. The CRS report, by Thomas L. Hungerford, a specialist in public finance, found that to be true: Millionaires, on average, paid about 30 percent of their income in federal taxes, while households earning less than $100,000 paid closer to 19 percent.So Warren Buffett and President Obama were right, and the Republicans were wrong.
But the averages hide wide variations within income categories, Hungerford wrote, with millionaires paying anywhere from 24 percent to more than 35 percent of their income in federal taxes. The lower tax bills are primarily the result of low tax rates on investment income, such as capital gains and dividends.
