for all the people who want to tax the rich more

[.::UNKNOWN::.]

'm going to use the example of a condominium here. In virtually every condominium you will find a condo fee. Everybody pays a share of the operating expenses of the condominium. How, though, do you figure out what the assessments will be if different people have different sized condos? Obviously the people in the larger condos should pay a higher fee than those in the smaller ones, right? That would be fair .. right? But how do you figure out who pays what? Well here's an idea? You add up the total square footage of the entire condominium. Just for the sake of argument, let's say that the total square footage is 300,000 square feet and the annual budget for operating the condo is $1,600,000. If you own a 2,300 square foot condo you own a total of 0.76% of the total square footage. This means that you should be responsible for 0.76% of the annual general operating expenses. That would bring your annual assessment to $12,160, or just over $1000 a month. If you own the 9,000 square foot condo you have about 3% of the total square footage, and your assessment is going to be about $4,000 a month.

Now does anyone want to argue that this would not be a fair way to assess the costs of operating the condo? There's your "fair share" in action.

Now .. since we're talking income taxes here (not wealth taxes -- income taxes) it would stand to reason that you would be paying your "fair share" of income taxes is you were paying in proportion to your share of the total income, just as our condo owners pay in proportion to their share of the square footage.

So ... let's look at the statistics and see where we stand. These figures come from the U.S. Treasury Department. Argue with them if you will .. but they are official government statistics. The Treasury Department refers to these numbers as "Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in 2005."

The bottom 50% of income earners in this country earn about 13.9% of all income. That would be the equivalent of owning 13.9% of the square footage in the condo. So ... to be fair, they should pay 13.9% of the total income taxes collected by the government, right? Well, the fact is they pay only 3.6% of the income taxes. Could it then be argued that the people in the bottom 50% of income earners aren't paying their fair share?

I don't want to drag this out with a full page of statistics from the Treasury Department .. so let's move on to the top 5% of income earners. The top 5% of income earners in the U.S. earn 31% of all income. So .. their "fair share" would be 31% of all income taxes, right? Well .. the fact is the top 5% of all income earners are paying 54.1% of all income taxes. Now that's a bit more than their "fair share" isn't it?

One last group: The evil, hated, derided "richest one percent." Yes .. here we are looking at the real high achievers . The top 1% of income earners in the U.S. in 2005 earned 16.5% of all income. You might be interested in knowing that this share is actually down from previous years. At any rate --- since the highest 1% of income earners are earning 16.5% of all income, they should be paying 16.5% of all income taxes, right? By now you must know what's coming. The fact is the top 1% of income earners, while earning 16.5% of the total income, are paying 33.7% of all income taxes. They're paying income taxes in an amount double their proportion of the income ... and Nancy Pelosi and her Democrat fellow travelers will tell you that they aren't paying their "fair share." alright discuss