Growls

A poll commissioned by the Tax Foundation and released on Thursday says the tax code is too complex and federal income taxes are “too high.” The news release begins:

“A new national survey commissioned by the Tax Foundation and conducted by Harris Interactive® shows a majority of U.S. adults think that federal income taxes are "too high" (56 percent), while four in every five adults say the federal tax code is complex (85 percent) and say that the tax system needs to be completely overhauled (82 percent).

“Despite the recent political and economic shakeups, the Tax Foundation's 2009 Survey of U.S. Attitudes on Taxes, Government Spending and Wealth Distribution shows that American opinions on tax issues have not changed markedly since 2007, the last time the survey was done. Issues of tax complexity, fairness and burdens continue to be important to the American people.

“To test whether U.S. adults view their tax burdens as too high or too low, the poll asked what the maximum percentage of a person's income should go to all taxes-federal, state and local. This year, the average response given is 15.6 percent.

"This average is significantly lower than he Tax Foundation's estimates of the nation's actual average total tax burden: 28.2 percent of income," said Matt Moon, the Tax Foundation's Manager of Media Relations, and author of the report on this year's survey, Tax Foundation Special Report No. 166.”

Jillian Bandes, at Townhall.com, comments on the Tax Foundation findings thus:

“If you're educated, there's a better chance you're in favor of higher taxes. If you're a man, you're more likely to be amenable to higher taxes than if you're a woman. And no matter who you are, you're probably estimating your overall tax burden to be 5-10 percentage points less than it actually is, meaning that a large majority of Americans are paying far more than they think they're paying.”

In what is claimed to be “(t)he most comprehensive collection of polls ever compiled on the subject of taxes,” Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute wrote in an opinion study the following about the tax burden faced by Americans:

“In seventy years of surveys, we can find no instance in which more than a tiny percentage of Americans said the amount they paid in taxes was too low. In most polls, pluralities or majorities say the amount is too high. In 2008 Gallup data, 52 percent said they paid too much and 42 percent about the right amount. On ten occasions since 1959, Gallup has asked people whether their taxes would rise or fall in the next year. On each occasion, more than 60 percent said that their taxes would rise.

“Surveys suggest that the local property tax is now seen as more onerous than the federal income tax. Thirty-six percent in February-March 2003 told Kaiser/NPR/Harvard that local property tax was the tax they disliked the most, followed by 29 percent who chose the income tax. Gallup shows a substantial jump since the late 1980s in the proportion of people mentioning the local property tax as the worst or least fair tax. In their April 2005 poll, 42 percent gave that response. Twenty percent said the federal income tax was the worst tax. Harris Interactive, in a 2009 online poll for the Tax Foundation, asked about federal and state/local taxes separately.  The state and local gas tax was thought to be ―not at all fair,” by 30% of those surveyed followed by local property taxes (25 percent).”

Finally, on January 8, 2008, Neal Boortz interviewed presidential nominee Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) on his WSB 750 AM radio talk show in Atlanta. Boortz wrote the following in his Nealz Nuze the following day:

“Kucinich started rambling about getting rid of the Bush tax cuts and making the rich pay their fair share of taxes, so I decided it might be time to see if this 10th District Congressman from Ohio actually knew what he was talking about.

“He didn't.”

Boortz then explains:

“ . . . Kucinich doesn't have any idea in the world how much of the total taxes are paid by the top one percent of income earners ... so I asked him two questions:

1. What percentage of total income is earned by the top 1% of income earners?
2. What percentage of total federal income taxes are paid by the top 1% of income earners.

“The answers were astounding. Congressman Dennis Kucinich thinks that the top 1% of income earners earns about 60% of all income, and he thinks that they pay about 15% of all income taxes. The fact is that the top 1% of all income earners pull in about 18% of all income and pay 38.8% of all income taxes.

“This is an astounding level of ignorance on such an important statistic . . . .”

And Kucinich wanted to be America’s president? Sheesh!