Taxes and conservative economics

Following up on my catalog of a few useful links that I have found to be integral to arguing with conservatives about economics, check out this helpful concise set of talking points against conservative rhetoric on taxes from TPM.

Ezra Klein has been on a rampage lately with graphs of taxes and tax burdens, probably due to the approach of April 15 and the (laughable) T.E.A. baggers...

Here are a few great recent posts of his on taxes and economics:

1. America vs. OCED countries on tax share vs. income share
2. State and local taxes
3. Graph of income share / overall tax burden
4. Explication of the "tax share" vs. "tax burden" problem
5. Graph of income share and tax burden with after-tax data
6. Effective federal tax rate versus income bracket graph
   

Also see Leonhardt on marginal tax rates in the NYT:

It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it was under Bill Clinton.

What’s much less known is that those old confiscatory rates were not as sweeping as they sound. They applied to only the richest of the rich, because yesterday’s tax code, unlike today’s, had separate marginal tax rates for the truly wealthy and the merely affluent. For a married couple in 1960, for example, the 38 percent tax bracket started at $20,000, which is about $145,000 in today’s terms. The top bracket of 91 percent began at $400,000, which is the equivalent of nearly $3 million now. Some of the old brackets are truly stunning: in 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt raised the top rate to 79 percent, from 63 percent, and raised the income level that qualified for that rate to $5 million (about $75 million today) from $1 million. As the economist Bruce Bartlett has noted, that 79 percent rate apparently applied to only one person in the entire country, John D. Rockefeller.

Today, by contrast, the very well off and the superwealthy are lumped together. The top bracket last year started at $357,700. Any income above that — whether it was the 400,000th dollar earned by a surgeon or the 40 millionth earned by a Wall Street titan — was taxed the same, at 35 percent. This change is especially striking, because there is so much more income at the top of the distribution now than there was in the past. Today a tax rate for the very top earners would apply to a far larger portion of the nation’s income than it would have years ago.

Here's the catalog of a few useful links:

update: 12/18

Although federal income taxes are progressive (get larger as income gets higher), all taxes do not, and as a share of one's income, the overall amount of taxes paid is fairly flat across all incomes. It literally comes down to a few points difference in total tax burden for people in the 2nd-5th quintiles of income.

Ezra Klein on the changes over time in overall tax burden (graph 1 source, graph 2 source)
Chart showing overall tax burden (CSM)
State and local tax burdens (NSN)
Washington Monthly on overall tax burden
NYT graph on overall tax burden (NYT article)
NYT graph on tax code changes and beneficiaries (NYT article)

11/1

Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (Bartels)
Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (chart, Krugman)
Income inequality under Dems v. GOP (Rolling Stone, Krugman)
Explanation of the causes of the financial crisis (Stiglitz)
The $3T War (Stiglitz)
Overall economic comparison of Dems v. GOP (Slate)
Overall economic comparison of Dems v. GOP (NYT, Alan Blinder)
How the GOP went from a $5.6T surplus to a $3.8T deficit (CBO)