History Shows Minimum Tax Schemes Tax Middle Class?

While “tax fairness” is always on the table in an election year, it’s worth being mindful that well over half of US households paid no federal income tax in 2021. Massive COVID stimulus tax credits & stimulus checks are part of story, yet seldom publicized is that over 44% didn’t have to pay a penny BEFORE the pandemic while the middle class, wealthy & businesses paid the lion’s share of Uncle Sam’s income tax revenue.

So suggests a recent analysis from the nonpartisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center that estimated 57% of Americans paid no taxes last year. As a Fox Business story notes that’s actually “slightly down from last year’s 60%, it marks a significant increase from the 44% recorded before the pandemic began.”

Meanwhile Pres Biden again resurrected his “tax the rich” agenda by proposing yet another “minimum tax,” this time, on “billionaires.” However, as the WSJ points out, the current “alternative minimum tax” passed in the so-called “Tax Reform Act of 1969 to “tax the 155 high-income households that had not paid a dime of federal income tax” now taxes nearly SIX million middle-class families who are caught in the never-ending expansion of government taxation, sometimes aided by the natural forces of inflation. The more things change in the Swamp’s rhetoric, the more taxes rise for the middle class?

Davd Soul