A nauseating new IRS report reveals just how much money the top one-thousandth of the 1 percent is hoarding
Justin Theroux in "American Psycho"
This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
Why are our seniors paying higher taxes on their social security benefits than billionaires pay on stocks?
The IRS released a new report that reveals the staggering amount of money that the top one-thousandth of the 1% in the US is hoarding.
While the top earners in the bottom 50 percent of Americans only make 36,000 dollars a year – the bottom earners in the top one-thousandth of the 1% “only make” more than 62 million dollars a year.
Sixty-two million dollars per year is what it takes to be a top one-thousandth one percenter – and those are the poorest of the richest households – on average the top earners make more than 160 million dollars a year.
That’s 160 times richer than the average one percenter who only makes about 1.5 million dollars.
That’s an obscene concentration of wealth – but that’s not the most outrageous part of the story, because those top earners are paying a lower tax rate than working class Americans and retirees.
The highest tax rate on income taxes in 2014 was 39.6 percent for households earning more than 439,000 dollars – and the majority of US households paid an income tax rate of between 15 percent and 28 percent.
Those are households of plumbers, bus drivers, doctors and engineers – the average working Americans who create real wealth for the economy.
Meanwhile the banksters and vulture capitalists – the billionaires who make most of their income by moving money back and forth – pay a maximum rate of 20 percent of their earnings from the stock market.
How does this happen? Why did Mitt Romney pay a lower effective tax rate in 2011 than a waitress earning $2.13 an hour?
It started with the memo that Lewis Powell wrote in 1971 – just a few months before Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court.
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