Wednesday, August 1, 2012

The 1% Ate Our Taxes

It's a little lame to write a post that just quotes someone else, but this is so important that I'm going to risk lameness:

...the government’s own Congressional Budget Office has just published a report whose statistics flatly contradict this claim. The CBO report shows that, while the average household income fell 12 percent between 2007 and 2009, the average for the lower four-fifths fell by 5 percent or less, while the average income for households in the top fifth fell 18 percent. For households in the "top 1 percent" that seems to fascinate so many people, income fell by 36 percent in those same years.

(This is from a recent Thomas Sowell article on NRO.)

Now look, there's no need to cry for the 1 percent. They're doing fine. But if we're going to have a national conversation about taxes, we need to know what we're talking about. The meme that the 1 percent are doing so much better than everyone else is simply wrong, and that fact needs to be known more widely.

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