Friday, April 20, 2012
The inequities of the tax code
James Stewart, a reporter for the New York Times, takes a look at the disaster the tax code has become after finding out why his AGR was up and his tax rate was down.
Like most Americans (though not Mitt Romney, who got an extension), I filed my 2011 tax returns this week and paid my five layers of income tax: federal, state, local, self-employed and something called the metropolitan commuter tax (even though I live in New York City and don’t commute). When I first looked at the returns, I was incredulous.Read the rest if you want to know some of the ways the Republicans have made the tax code cruelly regressive.
My adjusted gross income was higher than it was in 2010. Yet my overall tax rate went down. My alternative minimum tax also went down. Wasn’t the opposite supposed to happen — the more you make, the higher rate you should pay?
I called my accountant to double check, but my returns were correct. This perverse outcome proves that what I’d already discovered about the ultrarich also holds true for people who are far from the million-dollar bracket: our tax code isn’t progressive. It’s not even flat. For people like me — and I assume there are millions of us — it’s regressive. For many people, the more you make, the lower the rate you pay.
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