.....I know what you may be thinking. It’s about time the rich starting paying their fair share of taxes. However, last fall, the Washington, D.C.-based tax research organization The Tax Foundation looked at the latest release of Internal Revenue Service data on individual income taxes. In 2005:
The top-earning 25 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $62,068) earned 67.5 percent of the nation’s income, but they paid more than four out of every five dollars collected by the federal income tax (86 percent). The top 1 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $364,657) earned approximately 21.2 percent of the nation’s income (as defined by AGI), yet paid 39.4 percent of all federal income taxes. That means the top 1 percent of tax returns paid about the same amount of federal individual income taxes as the bottom 95 percent of tax returns.
Stephen Moore, a senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal editorial board and a contributor to CNBC, wrote in the November/December 2007 issue of The American magazine:
Yes, income in America is skewed toward the rich. But taxes are skewed far, far more. The top 5 percent pay well over half the income taxes.
Maybe the rich ain’t so bad after all. Get rid of them, and who will pay for all those precious government programs?
But the question still remains. Are rich Americans leaving, or planning to leave, the country? Consider a poll conducted by Zogby International which asked adult Americans if they had ever considered moving outside the United States. The survey, which had more than 115,000 respondents, excluded anyone relocating offshore for less than two years and anyone who relocated because of government requirements, the military or their jobs. Bob Bauman of offshore experts The Sovereign Society wrote on October 16:
The Zogby results are shocking – especially compared to the entire U.S. population (now about 303,116,000). The numbers below are for households, not individuals.
• 1.6 million U.S. households already decided to move offshore and are headed in that direction.
• Another 1.8 million households are seriously considering moving and are likely to do it. Many have taken preliminary steps.
• 7.7 million households are “somewhat seriously” considering moving and “may” do it.
• Nearly 3 million households are seriously considering buying a vacation home or other property outside the United States. Another 10 million are “somewhat” seriously considering it.
This means that almost 10% of U.S. households are considering leaving the country. Another 10% are considering living outside the country part-time. Most analysts are ignoring this silent massive emigration.
These would-be emigrant households plan to spend an average of US$260,000 on buying or building a house. They’re also planning to spend at least US$36,000 annually on living expenses outside the United States.
In total, they represent hundreds of billions of dollars leaving the U.S. economy each year.
Bauman quoted John Gaver of ActionAmerica.org, who said:
The problem is that increasingly, the wealthy perceive that they are under attack by their own government and they are taking the only rational option left open to them. They’re taking their wealth and leaving.
And regarding the number of wealthy Americans who have already left the country, Bauman wrote:
Every year, about 250,000 U.S. citizens and resident aliens leave America to make a new home in some other nation.
In 2005, the U.S. Bureau of the Census upped this estimate. They guessed that over 350,000 U.S. citizens and resident aliens would leave the United States permanently.
On February 15, John Gaver wrote in a piece on ActionAmerica.org:
Wealthy US citizens continue to leave the US at an alarming rate…
Tax haven countries are recording significantly larger numbers of US applicants for permanent residence or second citizenship every year. Keep in mind that most of those expats are wealthy, since poor people can’t afford to leave. In fact, millions of poor people risk their lives in the back of trailers or crossing Arizona desert every year, to take advantage of our increasing welfare state. It is the wealthy, who are leaving and they represent lost US investment dollars and subsequently, LOST US JOBS…
When big money is forced out of the US, it is the average citizen who has to make up the difference in higher taxes. The Income Tax and US government attacks on wealth is costing you money in more ways than you know.
