Low taxes on rich, prosperity unrelated

I’m tired of the right-wing distortions about taxes. “The bottom 50 percent pay no taxes,” is what we constantly hear. Well, sorry folks, but that’s a right-wing lie. According to the IRS, the bottom 50 percent pays about 3 percent of the total taxes collected. Considering that they earn about 2.5 percent of the money in the country, that number seems reasonable.

Especially when you consider that the biggest part of that 50 percent number is the elderly from Social Security income.

So why is it that the right wing complains about someone earning $10,000.00 paying no taxes, but we never hear about the 1,400-plus millionaires/billionaires who paid no taxes? Then we get the illogical argument about how much the rich pay as a percentage of taxes collected.

Beside being illogical, it is more than a little disingenuous. If there were two people who paid all of the taxes for a country and one made a million dollars and one made $100,000.00 and the tax rate was the same for both, The millionaire would be paying 10 times what the person paying $100,000.00 paid. So what? On average, because of all of their deductions, the wealthy pay less in taxes than the middle class — 16 percent vs. 25 percent-plus.

Additionally, you get huge numbers of U.S. corporations and foreign corporations that pay zero taxes. So, how is it fair that a company that isn’t even based in the U.S. pays no taxes?

We’re all in this together. Once the rich in this country start paying their fair share, then we can talk about others. Finally. Don’t tell me that we need to feel sorry for the rich, because they are the ones who create the jobs. Total lie. Taxes on the rich have been extremely low for the last 10 years. So where are the jobs? Obviously low taxes on the rich and jobs are unrelated.

Walter O’Brien

Dundee