NY Times Discovers Wealthy Don't Pay Much In Taxes; Kerry Haters Discovered That a Year AgoAs usual, you can read blogs or you can wait a year or so until the New York Times
catches up with the story.
The chances of having a large income but not paying taxes on any of it are growing, according to the data, issued in the Internal Revenue Service's annual report to Congress on well-to-do Americans who live tax free. About one in every 436 high-income Americans paid no taxes in 2002, up from one in 531 in 2001 and one in 1,010 in 2000.
Over all, the top 2 percent of earners, the 2.5 million filers with income of $200,000 or more, paid almost 27 cents in taxes for each dollar of income they reported in 2002, other I.R.S. data showed. This group accounted for 53.5 percent of the income tax paid by all Americans.
Among that high-income group, however, almost 83,000, or one in 33, paid less than a dime in taxes for every dollar of income. An additional 79,000 paid less than 15 cents. The average for all Americans was 13 cents.And among those who paid less than 15 cents in taxes for every dollar of income? Why, none other than Teh-RAY-za Heinz Kerry, as reported on the
Kerry Haters blog on May 9, 2004, drawing from
this article in the Washington Post.
Heinz Kerry reported a taxable income of $2.3 million, primarily from dividends and interest on savings and investments. She earned an additional $2.8 million from tax-exempt bonds. So far, she has paid $587,000 in estimated federal taxes, an effective tax rate of 11.5 percent, compared with the top federal income tax rate of 35 percent.
