Obama Has Cut Taxes for 98.6 Percent of Working* Households** (Nate Silver)

[jefferson_dem]

Obama Has Cut Taxes for 98.6 Percent of Working* Households**
by Nate Silver @ 9:00 AM

One thing I don’t quite get has been the White House’s reluctance to highlight the non-infrastructure parts of the stimulus package. Oh sure, people wanted more investment in roads and trains and energy grids and all that good stuff – I did too, and thought the stimulus package spent an inadequate amount of money on them. But you’re left with the impression that the rest of the stimulus was just thrown down a well somewhere. In fact, it was not. The extension in unemployment benefits that the government provided under the stimulus, for instance, is turning out to be highly useful to a lot of people. I don’t necessarily expect the people receiving extended unemployment insurance to turn around and write Obama a thank-you note – but the White House might want to at least occasionally make the point it’s their initiative that is helping them to keep putting food on the table.

Likewise with the tax reductions in the stimulus – which collectively made up $288 billion, or about 37 percent of the package. Most of those tax cuts are targeted at individuals. And while the they aren’t terribly deep, they are impressively broad.

The broadest tax cut in the stimulus package is the “Making Work Pay” tax credit, worth about $116.2 billion (see the Urban Brookings Tax Policy Center for this and other figures) and applicable to the vast majority of working Americans. Indeed, all single filers making less than $95,000 and all joint filers making less than $190,000 are eligible for this tax cut. Most of them, in fact, are already receiving it in the form of lower withholding on their paychecks.

The well-to-do are benefiting too – or at least they will once it comes time to file their taxes next April. That’s because, as part of the stimulus, the government extended the alternative minimum tax (AMT) “patch”, which reduces the tax burden for some 24-26 million Americans who would be subject to the AMT. Most people who would be hit by the AMT are doing pretty well. The median income among people who would be subject to the AMT is about $130,000, and the average is about $165,000. This has the convenient property, though, of starting to kick in right where the “Making Work Pay” credit phases out, meaning that a great number of Americans who won't benefit from former program will benefit from the latter one.

Finally, there are a number of smaller tax rebates and credits that are more highly targeted – to buyers of new cars and new homes, to small businesses, to low-income families with children, to the unemployed, and so forth. We’ll focus principally on one of these, which is the credit for new car purchases.

But first – what do I mean by “working households”? By “households”, I mean simply tax filers. There were about 143 million individual or joint income tax returns filed in 2007, according to the IRS (this is the most recent year for which statistics are available). By “working” I mean that the taxpayer had some sort of taxable income, which was true of about 111 million of the 143 million returns.

<SNIP>

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/08/obama-has-cut-ta...

[solstice]

1. BUT - if you are RETIRED - you get NOTHING.

I should know.

So - thanks for NOTHING, OBama.

[eleny]

2. Husband and I are retired and we got tax cuts

[SemiCharmedQuark]

5. So did my grandma.

[Schema Thing]

3. not according to the above.

[jefferson_dem]

4. FAIL.

Try again.

[shraby]

6. We got a check in the mail as did other retirees in this

round of tax cuts.

[goclark]

13. We got the tax cut too~

[Avalux]

9. My Dad is retired and got a tax cut. n/t

[Phx_Dem]

10. Nice try.

[Karenina]

11. Oh dear...

[Hansel]

14. My dad paid taxes when he was retired.

All the way up until his death at 84 and after. I should know, I was the executor for his estate. He wasn't rich, but he did have a healthy retirement account that he paid taxes on.

[madmom]

15. My husband and I are retired. We also got a tax cut!

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Baltoman991]

18. Geez,

that one probably didn't go as you'd hoped eh? Come back again with something factual as I know of no one retired who got nothing.

[ncteechur]

19. Move along troll.

[TexasObserver]

7. Recommend

[zbdent]

8. If a tree falls in the forest, and Faux News has it on tape, but doesn't

show it, did it make a sound?

[NYC_SKP]

12. K & R! nt

[Cha]

17. Maybe someone from Team Obama will

read Nate Silver!

Thanks admin for cutting taxes! Not that our US mediawhores would ever report it!

[SpartanDem]

20. Obama point these things out regularly

at almost every speech on the economy that he gives.