Men Pay 115% of Federal Taxes

Five Indefensible Features of the Tax System

As the U.S. economy heads into the next century, federal taxation will continue to be a dominant policy issue. It is not hard to understand why: the federal government will collect an enormous $1.9 trillion in taxes in 2000. Measured as a share of GDP, federal taxes now stand at a peacetime high of 21 percent, up from just 3 percent 100 years ago.

The extraction of $1.9 trillion each year from workers, retirees, business owners, consumers, savers, and investors imposes substantial costs on taxpayers over and above the revenue transferred to the government. In the long run, comprehensive tax reform could greatly reduce the harmful side effects caused by the federal tax system, benefitting taxpayers and encouraging economic growth.

Reforms can be made to both the tax base and tax rates. The tax base is the items and transactions that are taxed; the tax rate is the percentage of the tax base that the taxpayer has to pay the government. Much of the trouble with the tax code results from the overly complicated definitions of the tax base. The federal income tax code contains confusing rules regarding the "income" to be included on the numerous tax forms, while certain types of income face multiple layers of taxation. For example, corporate profits distributed to shareholders in the form of dividends are taxed at both the business level and the individual level, biasing taxpayers against investment and encouraging businesses to take on debt. http://www.senate.gov/~jec/jer99.htm#7

From the White House http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/New/html/eitc.html "The EITC lifted 4.3 million Americans out of poverty in 1997 -- more than double the number in 1993" [read:  the growth of the Earned Income Credit is out of control because the number of families being targeted for destruction is growing rapidly]

The standard IRS tax tables and median incomes for 1994 as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that men pay 117.9% of all federal taxes:

The above chart is based on a simple projection of the above IRS data, which shows that EIC payments from the IRS could reach almost $520 billion by the year 2006:

Where does the money come from?  The federal budget as a percent of GDP increased from 15% in 1960 to 22% in 1999.

Did women in the workforce improve the economy?  Note that as the percent of America's managers and administrators who were women increased from 19% in 1970 to 44% in 1999, GDP per worker declined to lower than it was in 1960, by the gold standard.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

For each 1 man over age 65 with no qualifying children who qualifies for EIC, there are 5 women, because of the Gaussian distribution of their incomes.  But this part of EIC is just noise level compared to the OTHER $53.5 billion of the $55 billion EIC and Child Tax Credit scam.
 
Per the Census Bureau, less than 2% of all households are single-father households with qualifying children.  But the median incomes of those households are $31,020
http://www.census.gov:80/hhes/income/mednhhld/ta7.html
 
They don't qualify for ANY EIC at all if they earn more than $30,095, which means that a very small part (MAYBE 10%?!) have incomes low enough to qualify for the full EIC of $3,756.  More than half of the 2%, or more than 1%, don't qualify at all, and of the less than 1% who do qualify, the average EIC they receive is less than $1,000.  This is a grand total of less than $1 billion.
 
Compare that to the 9 million KNOWN single-mother households so far who each qualify for EIC by one means or another at an average amount of more than $3,103 each, for a grand total of $27 billion NOT INCLUDING THE CHILD TAX CREDIT.
 
The median incomes of the 8 million households with children with non-working wives is $36,785.  If they have investment incomes of more than $2,300, they don't qualify for EIC.  At most, 1 million of
these households qualify for EIC at $3,103 each, for a total of $3.1 billion.  These 8 million one-working-parent households earn only 32% each less than each of the 18 million two-working-parent households with children.  BUT--when the wife goes to work, the taxes paid by two thirds of those 18 million families DECREASE by as much as $3,756 each because of the Child Care Credits which one-working-parent families don't get. This is another $45 billion loss in IRS tax revenues just because mothers go to work.
 
And what does this do?  Their kids become latch key kids who make bombs and buy assault weapons and shoot fellow students without having to worry about their mothers interfering in their plans.
 
The money that funds all this social pathology doesn't come from "wealth"!   It comes from DEBT.  The median household debt is already $60,000, mainly because of government largesse like
this debt.htm
 
It is amoral.  It is amoral to TAKE $55 billion by government force from indebted working fathers and hand it over to amoral single-mother households which breed the children who fill up our prisons.  78% of our prison population grew up in single-mother households, at a time when less than 20% of all households were SMHs, and now the number of SMHs has grown geometrically.