How Washington, D.C. and the Banking Industry is Killing the Housing Market, Part I

President Obama has this great idea to tax millionaires — his “Buffet/Buffett tax” — that is, getting those who actually earn $1,000,000 a year or more, not the poor strapped $100,000 middle or upper or whatever middle class you call them.  Of course, the rich can afford fancier attorneys and CPA’s to toodle around income streams, and most obtain a lot of wealth from lower taxed investment earnings, which, I might add, stimulate the economy and create jobs.

According to the non-partisan Tax Policy Center,  the wealthiest people in America DO pay a lot more in taxes than the middle class or the poor. The  TPC says households making more than $1 million will pay, on average, 29.1 percent of their income in federal taxes. A household making between $50,000 and $75,000 will pay 15 percent of its income in federal taxes, which includes income taxes and Social Security payroll taxes.

But the Alternative Minimum Tax is biting more and more income earners in the income brackets in-between.

And a recent story in The Washington Post says the government is really losing the most in tax revenue out of those middle incomers in an invisible web of tax benefits and  —

All told, federal taxpayers last year received $1.08 trillion in credits, deductions and other perks while paying $1.09 trillion in income taxes, according to government estimates.

That is ALL federal taxpayers. Only 8 percent of those benefits, says the Post, went to corporations. (“The write-off for corporate jets equals about .03 percent of the total.”) The bulk of the tax cuts went to primarily upper-middle-class families that Obama has vowed to protect from new taxes.

“The big money is in the middle-class subsidies,” said Syracuse University economist Leonard Burman, former director of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “You’re not going to balance the budget by eliminating ethanol credits. You have to go after things that really matter to a lot of people.”

Seems like we are wasting precious time having all these esoteric, highly intellectual discussions over THEORY while what we really need is action: JOBS.