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Tax fairness is where people pay more taxes on each dollar of income as their income increases. However, in our state, basically the poor pay the most on a dollar earned and the rich pay the least on a dollar earned. So the quickest fix to our economic woes would be to be have the richest top 10% of our population pay the same as the poorest 10% percent of our population.
Total Household Income for richest * difference in tax rate
$74,923,747 * (19.3% - 10.8%) = $6.4 billion potential income
Compare that to the project deficit = $5.27 billion deficit
The blatant tax unfairness is well documented in the Minnesota Tax Incidence Studies:
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| Each population decile represents ten percent of the population of households in the study. The number on the lowest decile looks abnormal. That is from two effects. First of all, at the lowest level of income people do not have file taxes, so some income is unreported. The second effect comes from the fact that really we should have a percentile for people losing income, which are people still paying property taxes, sales taxes, and fees from savings or borrowed money.
Our Republican Governor Pawlenty is the most loyal supporter of the rich, since raising income taxes is "off the table". Under Republican leadership, the rich have been paying less and less of their fair share while gathering even more wealth. Basically the Republican has been shifting money from income taxes to property taxes, a tax that must be paid even when unemployed.
Another way of looking at income distribution is splitting the income into ten parts, where each income decile represented ten percent of the income of households in the study. The income shift is obvious in the lower income deciles all gained numbers while fewer numbers are in the upper income. The tenth income decile includes only 0.3 percent of all households, yet their share of total taxes (7.9 percent) was lower than their share of household income (10 percent).
And if this not obvious enough, then this graph from
afferentinput shows the whole US trend of the richer get richer and the rest of us get poorer.
Basically if we had tax fairness, we would not have a budget problem. However since we have the sweet charismatic Republican governor Pawlenty, the rest of will pay in less government services. Some people will either die from being unable to afford health care or go bankrupt. More people will lose homes from the increasing burden of property tax in these uncertain economic times. And the richest of the rich will not suffer in the least, the very ones who would not probably not even notice the additional taxes.
As long we have Republican governor Pawlenty who will tell us to tighten our belt, the Republicans keep their promise to protect the rich. When we have no money for bread, maybe Pawlenty will even say "Let them eat cake!". |
