In 2012. compared with the vast majority, the top 400 taxpayers did especially well. Their incomes increased by half.
The tax returns of the top 400 earners reported average income of $335.7 million, a real increase of more than $111 million over 2011, a new IRS report reveals.
Even better for the top 400, their taxes came to just 16.7 percent of their adjusted gross income.
Among the top 400, the IRS report shows that 32 paid nothing [which means they are part of Romney’s 47%] to 10 percent in income tax; 123 others paid under 15 percent.
For the bottom 90 percent, incomes rose in 2012, but by a scant $159, or one-half of 1 percent, from the year before. Their average was $31,610. That means the vast majority’s average income in 2012 rose by $3.06 a week, contrasted with the $2.1 million more a week, on average, that the top 400 enjoyed.
While those at the top have been rolling in dough, the vast majority of Americans remain much worse off than before the Great Recession. Their average 2012 income was $4,775 less than in 2007 and $5,443 less than in 2000.
The decline in the incomes among the bottom 90 percent and the corresponding rise at the top both track the fall in unions, which represent fewer than 7 percent of private-sector workers today, down from more than a third of workers in the 1950s through the mid-’70s.
Lacking bargaining power, most workers have had to contend with almost two decades of flat to falling wages. In 2013 average pay fell in 59 of the 60 salary levels that the government tracks. Wages rose only for the fewer than 100 workers with jobs paying $50 million or more state and local corporate welfare costs each family of four more than $900 a year.
The top earners pay such low taxes rates because most of their incomes are from capital gains and dividends, which Congress taxes at lower rates than wages.
There’s a word for a government whose policies pump up the incomes of top earners and cut their tax rates while suppressing what the vast majority earn. That term is “oligarchy.”
via Top 400 Americans got a huge income boost and low tax rates in 2012.