Study highlights tax burden disparity
Lowand middle-income families pay a disproportionate share of taxes in Virginia, a study by a tax policy institute concluded yesterday.
The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the Virginia Organizing Project, which represents low-income Virginians, said Virginia families earning less than $19,000 a year pay 8.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, while the richest taxpayers -- those making more than $1.5 million a year -- pay only 6.3 percent.
Matthew Gardner, executive director of the institute, said the main reason for the unfairness of the Virginia tax system is the state's reliance on sales and excise taxes. The sales tax on food was lowered by 2 percentage points to 2.5 percent in 2004, when Gov. Mark R. Warner pushed through a $1.4 billion tax increase.
Virginia's income tax is the same 5¾ percent for all taxpayers with income of $17,000 or more.
-- Tyler Whitley
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If you make $10,000 and I make $7,000, then each of us is taxes 15%, how is that unfair? Maybe the person earning $7,000 needs to do something about earning more. As a result of the higher earner having more disposable income, why should he be taxed more for buying more? How about those jobs he is creating/keeping? Where is it written that all persons must earn the same, have the same disposable income, and yet be taxed differently due to class envy?
It is unfair by any ideological (except for plutocracism)definition that those making less than $19K per year pay 8.9 percent of their income in VA income taxes, while those earning more than $150K pay only 6.3 percent.
Moreover, that sort of inequity creates the kind of limit on class mobility that makes a mockery of the “American Dream.“ How can people pick themselves up by their bootstraps if they can’t afford boots?
The VA income tax structure is bad for democracy, bad for capitalism.
Nothing new here, just more “class envy” writing. 40% pay federal taxes for the bottom 60%, yet somehow the latter is are getting a raw deal. Hmmm. Fixed sales taxes are a matter of consumption determined by the individual, of course never objected to by the people who pay them. Property taxes are based on property values, so how are the poor being hurt? In other words this study is nothing more than an attempt to show how more should be sucked out of the rich to give to… Besides, Bush did it!
I guess I would have to agree with Mr Gardner (Executive Director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the Virginia Organizing Project). It certainly is unfair that the guy who makes $19,000 only pays $1,691 in taxes while the fellow earning $1,500,000 pays $94,000, but gets no more government services for the extra money.
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