Soaking the Poor, State by State

 By Kevin Drum| Fri Feb. 3, 2012  Mother Jones.

You have heard, perhaps, that rich people in America are egregiously overtaxed. And the poor? They're the lucky duckies! Why, 47 percent of Americans pay no taxes at all!

(This is not true, of course. Many poor and elderly Americans pay no federal income tax, but they pay plenty of other taxes.)

Still and all, it's true that the federal income tax is indeed progressive. Conservatives are right about that—though it's not as progressive as it used to be, back before top marginal rates were lowered and capital gains taxes were slashed in half. But conservatives are a little less excited to talk about other kinds of taxes. Payroll taxes aren't progressive, for example. In fact, they're actively regressive, with the poor and middle classes paying higher rates than the rich.

And then there are state taxes. Those include state income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and fees of various kinds. How progressive are state taxes?

Answer: They aren't. The Corporation for Enterprise Development recently released a scorecard for all 50 states, and it has boatloads of useful information. That includes overall tax rates, where data from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy shows that in the median state (Mississippi, as it turns out) the poorest 20 percent pay twice the tax rate of the top 1 percent. In the worst states, the poorest 20 percent pay five to six times the rate of the richest 1 percent. Lucky duckies indeed. There's not one single state with a tax system that's progressive. Check the table below to see how your state scores.

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MY THOUGHTS:

This is another indicator of how the Republicans have been purchased by the top 1% of the country and the corresponding large corporations and banking institutions.

The level of GREED is so reminiscent of the Gilded Age of America and the Roaring Twenties that came to an abrupt halt in 1929.  This greed is manifested in the huge tax reduction that the 1% of the population, the very wealthy, got from G.W. Bush's two tax reductions. Do you remember him saying during the State of The Union address, "The country has a surplus and this money is your money and I intend to give it back." He was not talking to the middle class or the poor, he was talking to his buddies the very wealthy. The ones that did evil things with our money that brought the economy to it knees and the world near another Great Depression Part II.