My Tax Burden, In Detail

[tongodeon]

Democrats are high taxing, high-spending liberals who raise taxes. Republicans cut taxes because they don't have a big government to pay for. That's the conventional wisdom, anyway. And every year around tax time, some people bitch about how much this President or that President spends on taxes. Recently the Tea Party Movement in particular are up

Comments

[mister_borogove]

But what you're completely overlooking in this analysis is the Fact that under Bush, all your taxes went to fighting terrism, and under Obama, all your taxes are going to black people.

[ikkyu2]

some people bitch about how much this President or that President spends on taxes.

That's a funny way to phrase it, but I think it gets at the heart of the complaint, which you have sort of evaded, which is that the current state of affairs is that the President and Congress spend more of the taxes than are actually taken in, i.e., deficit spending. You have made a good case that tax collection as a percentage of AGI and TI is dropping and has dropped under both Bush and Obama. But you don't anywhere reference expenditures of the tax money, which have grown and continue to do so.

There's also an argument to be made that we have not yet seen what Obama can actually do with regard to raising taxes because he's only been in office a year, and in fact the current tax policies are a holdover from the Bush era. Perhaps Obama intends to raise taxes dramatically and has just not gotten around to it. People are making this argument but I don't know how valid or true it is.

[ponsdorf]

I was gonna offer the deficit as one of those 'inconvenient truths' seemingly ignored in the post but you did it well enough.

Aside: I don't quite buy into ALL of the doom and gloom scenarios, but there ARE only two ways to balance any budget. Cut spending or increase income.

[tongodeon]

I was gonna offer the deficit as one of those 'inconvenient truths' seemingly ignored in the post

National debt by US Presidential term

[tongodeon]

There's also an argument to be made that we have not yet seen what Obama can actually do with regard to raising taxes because he's only been in office a year, and in fact the current tax policies are a holdover from the Bush era. Perhaps Obama intends to raise taxes dramatically and has just not gotten around to it.

It is all but certain that this will happen. Now that the recession is "over", people who are good at math are shifting policy from away from stimulus and toward deficit reduction. Deficit spending is fine in the short term to get yourself out of a financial hole, but you don't want to run your economy on it long term.

Obama has put together a "nonpartisan deficit commission" so that someone can say what is politically impossible to admit otherwise: we need to start paying down the debt with a combination of cutting spending and increasing taxes.

So yes, I actually expect that taxes will increase dramatically since the math says they must under either party. I also expect that the teabaggers will focus on the tax-

[damongolian]

is it possible, to see a graph, that charts the change of the AGI over the years?

yah, I don't wanna see raw #'s just something that shows the relationship between the years..

[tongodeon]

Yeah, last night after doing the percentages I made this chart. I think it's interesting that I'm paying the same amount in taxes that I paid ten years ago, I'm just paying more deductible expenses like mortgage interest.

[damongolian]

thx for sharing!!! another question.... prior to 2003, when you bought your house... were you itemizing deductions, or were you still taking the standard deduction?

Prior to buying my house in 98 I never had enough deductions to itemize.... but the mortgage interest put me over the top there.... and since then I've been getting a huge amount of tax relief from that.

I'm curious what your taxes would have looked like, if you hadn't bought the house.... I notice that your income took a big jump between 02-03, but that was also when you bought the house; I think your taxes only made a small increase. Does that seem accurate to you as well?

[tongodeon]

I don't have the numbers in front of me now, but certainly part of what you see there is me getting "good at taxes". I keep very good track of what I spend, what's deductible, etc. Part of the deductions are also contributions to a 401k, so I also don't pay tax on that.