That the “rich” evade more taxes is no surprise. As there is little surprise that welfare fraud is much higher among low income persons.

The more unfair a tax system seems the less willing to pay taxes you become. I come from Sweden and we had the highest marginal taxes in the world before 1990. In some cases small business owners could pay 105 % of earned income in taxes. As a consequence the Swedish national pastime in those days was tax avoidance and tax evasion. After the reform tax avoidance virtually disappeared, as did most of the tax evasion. (You cannot however get rid of tax evasion it will always be there no matter how low the taxes are.) during the Swedish banking crisis the taxes were raised again and as a result tax avoidance rose to higher levels than ever, Sweden’s high earners felt that the taxes had become punitive and unfair.

In a political system were a majority of 51 % can confiscate the other 49 % taxes it is very important that taxes are considered fair by the ones paying the taxes. Fairness is not in the eye of those that are recipient of the redistributive aspects of those same taxes. Especially if the ones tax is a minority of 10 %.

The rhetoric on taxes in the US today is strange. Never before in modern times has the “rich”, top 10 % of income earners paid such a large proportion of all taxes, 60 %. (Top 1 % pays 1/3 of taxes). To say that the top 10 %, “rich”, does not pay enough is pure demagoguery, populism.

Personally, I do not belong to the top 10 % myself, believe that taxing the top 10 % for political and financial expediency is a bad idea. People shouldn't be punished for being successful, and they already pay most of the tax burden.

The message of Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden is a push-back to the myth that the tax cuts championed by Bush were for the well-off. The nonpartisan National Center for Policy Analysis disputed that idea in a report earlier this year.

"It is politically popular to say that tax cuts benefit the wealthy," said Michael D. Stroup, a Stephen F. Austin University economist who authored the NCPA report. "The accusation does not match the reality."


In my opinion America doesn't need policies that take more money from one group of citizens and give it to another. We need leaders who will cut spending and live within a budget. It's what most of us do, and we should expect the same of our government.

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Here are some of the underreported findings from the NCPA report:

• The top 1 percent of income earners pay more than $1 in every $3 the Internal Revenue Service collects; from 1986 to 2004, the total share of the income tax burden paid by the top 1 percent of earners grew from 25.8 to 36.9 percent, while the total share of the tax burden paid by the bottom half of earners fell from 6.5 to only 3.3 percent.

• During the same period, the percentage of income the top 1 percent of tax filers paid in federal income taxes rose from 18.3 to 19.6 percent; by contrast, the percentage of income the bottom fifth of tax filers paid in federal income taxes dropped from 0.4 percent to zero.

• The income share of the top 1 percent rose 7.7 percentage points, from 11.3 to 19 percent, while their income-tax burden rose by 11 points, from 26 to 37 percent.

The study is backed up by data from Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation:

• In 2006, 53.7 percent of federal income taxes were paid by those with incomes of more than $200,000. Those earning between $100,000 and $200,000 paid 28.3 percent of individual income taxes.

• Added up, those with incomes of more than $100,000 paid 82 percent of the total.

• They also paid 44.4 percent of payroll taxes.

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