0.82% should be the number Democrats talk about from now until election day. If that's not going to make the majority of America say "WTF", I'm not sure what will. If Romney is still elected despite this, I'm not sure what to say. It'd be worse than Bush in 2004.
Apropos of this:
It so happens that this summer the Internal Revenue Service released data from the 400 individual income tax returns reporting the highest adjusted gross income. This elite ultrarich group earned on average $202 million in 2009, the latest year available. And buried in the data is the startling disclosure that six of the 400 paid no federal income tax.
The I.R.S. has never before disclosed that last fact.
Not even Mr. Romney, with reported 2010 income of $21.7 million, qualifies for membership in this select group of 400. But the data provides a window into the financial lives and tax rates of the superrich. Since the I.R.S. doesnt release data for the tiny percentage of Americans at Mr. Romneys income level, the 400 are the closest proxy.
And that data demonstrates that many of the ultrarich can and do reduce their tax liability to very low levels, even zero. Besides the six who paid no federal income tax, the I.R.S. reported that 27 paid from zero to 10 percent of their adjusted gross incomes and another 89 paid between 10 and 15 percent, which is close to the 13.9 percent rate that Mr. Romney disclosed that he paid in 2010. (At the other end of the spectrum, 82 paid 30 to 35 percent. None paid more than 35 percent.) So more than a quarter of the people earning an average of over $200 million in 2009 paid less than 15 percent of their adjusted gross income in taxes....
The data show that the ultrarich typically pay low tax rates every year, but 2009 was a special case. In 2008, people with large stock portfolios and other less liquid assets were disproportionately hit with large losses on paper. One of the oddities of the tax code is that capital gains taxes are discretionary, since they must be paid only when gains are realized. And they can be offset by losses. The silver lining in a bad year like 2008 for wealthy people is that they can harvest losses by selling assets, then use those losses to offset any gains. They can also carry forward the losses to offset gains in future years.
Theres ample evidence that happened in 2009 among the richest taxpayers. Their average income, $202 million, dropped from $270 million in 2008 and was the lowest since 2004. Like Mr. Romney in 2010, for the richest taxpayers most income comes from capital gains and other investment income. Their net capital gains (the data doesnt include gross gains and losses) dropped by nearly 40 percent, from an average of $154 million in 2008 to $93 million in 2009, which accounts for nearly all of their drop in total income. Even with these lower gains, these 400 taxpayers, a minuscule fraction of the population at large, still managed to account for 16 percent of all capital gains. That is the highest percentage since the data was first released for 1992, when that percentage was less than 6 percent.
Tax experts I consulted said these results almost certainly reflected aggressive use of tax-loss carry-forwards from 2008, since the stock market bottomed in March 2009 and rallied strongly during the rest of the year.
The superrich also accounted for a disproportionate amount of dividend income, which averaged over $26 million for the top 400, or over 6 percent of total dividend income, also a record. Capital gains and dividends are both taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent, as opposed to the maximum rate on earned income of 35 percent, which helps explain why so many of the superrich pay a relatively low rate. ...
Whats abundantly clear, both from Mr. Romneys 2010 returns and from the returns of the top 400, is that at the very pinnacle of taxpayers, the United States has a regressive tax system. The top 400 earn more than 1 percent of all income in the United States, more than double their share in 1992. These 400 earned a total of $81 billion in 2009 but paid an average tax rate of just 19.9 percent.
Its regressive because capital gains and dividends dominate the top returns and are taxed at a preferential rate, Professor Kleinbard said. ...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/b...lues-to-romneys-tax-returns-common-sense.html