"Paid no taxes" . . . . . Help me out here . . . . .

[Stinky The Clown]

The CBO is said to have reported that 46.7 "paid not income taxes" but did pay "payroll taxes".

Wait just a fucking minnit here.

Are "income taxes" and "payroll taxes" the same thing paid in different ways?

Each paycheck, your employer withholds federal income tax from your paycheck. At the end of the year, you do your taxes and settle up. If your withholding was too small, you pay. If too much was withheld , you get a refund. But the difference between what you paid and what you get as a refund is your taxes.

Taxes you paid.

What is this 47% crap?

[Hubert Flottz]

1. Something Mitt pulled out of his royal red

Mitch McConnell

[dkf]

2. 47% of filers have no federal income tax obligation. If the funds were withheld it gets refunded.

That is different from the payroll tax for which you do not submit tax returns.

[Stinky The Clown]

3. Give me some examples, please

Not arguing . . . . just not understanding.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. OASDI, Medicare are payroll taxes

I.e., the stuff that Rmoney and his ilk keep calling "freebies". They're NOT "free". People pay into SS and Medicare.

[metalbot]

9. You can easily make $40k per year and not owe federal taxes

Let's assume a family of 2 parents, 4 kids. Mom works and makes $40k per year at a dentist's office. Dad stays home to take care of the kids. Married, filing jointly, they have a standardized deduction of about $16k. That takes their taxable income down to $24K. The first $17k of that income is taxed at 10%, so they owe $1700. That leaves us with an additional $7k that is taxed at 15%. We'll round down to get nice numbers, and assume they owe another $1000 in taxes for that income. So their net tax bill is now $2700. However, these parents get tax credits for their children of $1000 each, which gives them $4000 in tax credits. The tax credits that they have now cancel out the taxes that they owe. They would get a refund of 100% of the federal taxes that were withheld. In fact, this family could make almost $50k a year and still owe no federal taxes.

Now, that same family will have paid payroll taxes on that $40k of income. That's taken out each month and matched by your employer. That money is not "refundable", since that is paying for social security and medicare.

[LaydeeBug]

4. There was a report that came out (about a year ago?) saying that 43% of Americans

pay no income tax. Now this was a legit report, but the whole story was that this was a group of people who WORKED FULL TIME and still made such a low wage that they did not qualify to pay federal INCOME tax.

That did not stop the right wingers from screaming like someone had just stolen the meat off their plate.

I can't find the report. I really thought I had it bookmarked.

[X_Digger]

5. Payroll taxes include medicare / social security?

That's the only sense I can make out of the difference between 'income taxes' and 'payroll taxes'.

As to the 47%- those people making less than X, or as a family with Y dependents making less than Z (I forget the numbers, but it's very small), get a refund of all their federal withholding dollars. Most still pay into medicare / social security, as well as any sales taxes on their purchases or property taxes on their homes/cars/etc.

Basically, 47% of americans earn so little that they don't owe federal taxes.

In actuality, only about 14% paid no taxes (federal or med/ss)-- because they are elderly or disabled.

Emit made a recent post that has some good information-
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021364499

[JoeyT]

6. I'm wondering if they're including

infants, children, and retirees to get that number.

Of course minimum wage is damned low and we've replaced so many manufacturing jobs with shitty service sector jobs that pay minimum wage that I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there actually ARE that many working people that fall below the line for paying income tax. If that's the case, it isn't an argument for taxing the rich less or taxing the poor more, but instead is a fine argument for raising the minimum wage.

One of the things I noticed in the map people were showing of the states that have the highest percentages of people that don't pay taxes is the states that had the highest percentages are the ones where greedy assholes are most likely to try to pay around minimum wage for absolutely everything.

Edited to add: This explains it at least partially: (Via: Amanda Marcotte@ Pandagon http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/09/18/romney-and-the-rich-self-deluded/ )

Firstly, some of those people who did not pay income tax, still paid payroll taxes, for social security and Medicare, so that it was only 18.1% of households that did not pay any income or payroll taxes.

Of the 18.1% paying no income or payroll taxes, more than half (10.3% of all households) were elderly, so retired people who may well have paid income and payroll taxes, as well as others, during their working lives. Of the remainder, 6.9% of all households did not pay income or payroll taxes, essentially because they were poor, leaving 1% of “others” who did not pay either of these two types of taxes. Presumably, within the “others” category would fall the likes of six of the 400 US tax filers in 2009 with the highest adjusted gross income (at least $77m), who, according to Internal Revenue Service studies, paid no US income tax, and the 19,551 US households with income above $200,000 who owed no US or foreign income tax.

[Rockholm]

7. Well, since corporations are people, add them into that too, dear Mittens.

How many huge corporations paid NO taxes last year> Guess they are beholden too.