In its corporate wisdom, the New York Times recently decided to hide its most influential columnists behind a subscription wall. So those who have been accustomed to reading the likes of Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd for free on the Internet will have to pay $50 per year for the privilege. But to make this proposition more attractive, the Times promised that it would provide a little something extra for subscribers. Apparently, this involves publishing articles by its editorial writers that are not good enough to appear in the print edition of the paper.
The first of these articles appeared on October 4 and dealt with taxation. It was written by Times editorial board member Teresa Tritch, who writes most of the paper’s economic editorials. Tritch lists her qualifications as having degrees in German and journalism, as well as years of writing about personal finance for Money magazine where she explained why people should shop around for the lowest price before buying soap and things of that sort.
What really qualifies Tritch to lecture the rest of us about tax policy is her absolute conviction that our tax system is tilted too much in favor of the rich. To read her diatribe, one would think that the wealthy pay no taxes at all and that the tax burden falls almost entirely on the poor and middle class. One would also come away thinking that taxes do not affect economic growth in any way.
According to Tritch, our tax system should serve one purpose and one purpose only — to soak the rich. Any reduction in tax rates, especially on saving and investment, has nothing to do with raising growth, and is nothing but a give-away to the ultra-wealthy. Despite her paucity of knowledge or experience in the field of economics, one can see now why she was hired by the Times.
The reality, of course, is that the wealthy pay almost all of the U.S. federal income tax. There also is clear and compelling evidence that our tax system — especially its misguided redistributive elements — imposes a heavy cost in terms of growth that is ultimately paid by the non-wealthy in the form of lower productivity and, hence, lower wages and incomes.
Interestingly, the latest Internal Revenue Service data on distribution of the tax burden were released the same day Tritch’s tirade appeared. The data show that the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid 34.3 percent of all federal income taxes in 2003, although they earned just 16.8 percent of the adjusted gross income. The top 5 percent of taxpayers paid more than half of all federal income taxes, the top 10 percent paid two-thirds, and the top half of taxpayers paid 96.5 percent — meaning that the bottom half paid just 3.5 percent.
Another IRS report deconstructed the top 1 percent and found that the top 10 percent of the top 1 percent (the top 0.1 percent) increased their share of all federal income taxes from 7 percent in 1980 to 15.3 percent in 2003. These 129,000 tax filers earned 7.6 percent of the income and paid an average tax rate of 23.6 percent. This came to $114.6 billion — four times more than all the taxes paid by the 64 million taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent, who paid an average tax rate of 2.9 percent.
I would be curious to know just how much more Tritch thinks the wealthy ought to be paying. Back in the good old days (from her point of view) when Jimmy Carter was president and the top statutory tax rate was 70 percent (versus 35 percent today), the top 1 percent of taxpayers paid only 19.7 percent of all federal income taxes. In other words, although the marginal tax rate of the top 1 percent has fallen by 50 percent, their tax share has almost doubled.
I assume that Tritch would be happier with the British tax system, where the top income tax rate is 40 percent. But according to British tax data, the top 1 percent of taxpayers pay just 21 percent of income taxes, the top 5 percent pay 40 percent, and the top 10 percent pay 52 percent. The bottom 50 percent, meanwhile, pay 11 percent of all income taxes. In other words, wealthy British pay higher rates — as Tritch would have it here — but pay less of the overall tax burden.
According to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, we pay a very high price for the heavy taxation on saving, investment, corporate earnings, and estates that Tritch strongly favors. It found that the efficiency cost of the tax system — the output that is lost over and above the tax itself — is between 2 percent and 5 percent of the gross domestic product. In short, we lose between $240 billion and $600 billion every year just because of the way we raise taxes.
– Bruce Bartlett is senior fellow for the National Center for Policy Analysis. Write to him here.