9 Things The Rich Don’t Want You To Know About Taxes
1. Poor Americans do pay taxes.
Ari Fleischer, the former Bush White House spokesman, once said ‘50 percent of the country gets benefits without paying for them.’
Actually, they pay lots of taxes—just not lots of federal income taxes.
[…]
When it comes to state and local taxes, the poor bear a heavier burden than the rich in every state except Vermont, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy calculated from official data. In Alabama, for example, the burden on the poor is more than twice that of the top 1 percent. The one-fifth of Alabama families making less than $13,000 pay almost 11 percent of their income in state and local taxes, compared with less than 4 percent for those who make $229,000 or more.
Nevermind the fact that the reason many people pay no federal taxes is that so many Americans are impoverished—at least partly as a result of gov’t policies.