Originally Posted by
mikedog
And to the class warfare point, here is a summary of the latest federal income tax data (courtesy of Tax Foundation) showing the average tax rate paid by U.S. taxpayers:
2009
Top .1% - 24.28% (17.11% of total income tax paid)
Top 1% - 24.01% (36.73% of total income tax paid)
Top 5% - 20.46% (58.66% of total income tax paid)
5-10% - 11.36% (11.81% of total income tax paid)
10-25% - 8.25% (16.83% of total income tax paid)
25-50% - 5.56% (10.45% of total income tax paid)
50-100% - 1.85% (2.25% of total income tax paid)
Conveniently, Obama ignores these statistics and instead uses outliers (i.e., Warren Buffet) to support the false narrative that the top 1% pay a lower tax rate that the middle class, which dovetails into his "pay your fair share" mantra. The way I see it, the wealthy in this country are already paying their fair share. We just need to create an economic environment that creates more wealthy people. Only the private sector can create wealth, and the only economic system which historically has been successful at growing the private sector is free market capitalism.