Though I am glad you brought it up, because I did not think of that when comparing the NTU bottom 50% figure to per capita US income. The latter is still about 11% more than $33,000 plus a standard deduction around ten grand, which still ain't great, but a lot better than 50% more.


Maybe I am being overly generous, but I assumed they were talking about households because that is about the only way to effectively use data from tax returns. It is far from perfect, because roommates, unmarried couples and adult children living with parents often result in one household filing multiple returns, but should be fairly representative. With unemployment around 9%, a lot of those households ARE filing a single return, without the ability to list the unemployed member(s) as dependents, even though in a practical sense they are. It passes the smell test, and without all the data to evaluate first hand that is probably the best we can expect; we must either use it as an educated guess, resort to uneducated guess or be content to label the whole thing "Here There Be Revenuers."


What got me was both sides, despite almost completely opposite agendas, drew the same conclusion (the middle class pulls its own weight plus that of many others.) Both fit it into their respective narratives, and I obviously find Stewarts more credible than the NTUs, but the critical core observation is basically the same; they only emphasize different aspects of it. If the middle class bears more than its share, the ethical, logical and practical question is how to reduce some of that unfair burden.

Part of the answer is unquestionably large spending reductions, but since the generation old decision to make up deficits by borrowing from the SS trurst fund (an option officially exhausted last year,) there must be more to it. Without deficits the federal government would be running surpluses (as it was in the '90s) but the middle class would still be taking a beating (as it was in the '90s; it was just disguised by the upper middle class "benefiting" from inflated-but-worthless stock, either directly or via 401(k)s.) The only way to give them a fair shake is to shift some of their tax burden elsewhere, which brings us back to the same old issue: Do we shift it to people with the most money, or those with none? Mathematically and therefore practically I only see one answer; that I happen to think it the moral answer as well is just a happy coincidence (or unhappy, depending on whether we actually do it.)

Bottom line for me is that the sharp but steady reduction in upper class taxes that began around the time our lives did unmistakably correlates with Americas sharp but steady economic, strategic and diplomatic decline. As always, correlation does not prove causation, but it does not disprove it either.