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Food stamps provide like $50 a week per person. Assuming you earn enough to be paying taxes, you should easily have more money than them to spend on food. Maybe you can get in touch with KiKi's family and get advice on budgeting your money.
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Are you sure about that? A customer paying with EBT (food stamps) will have the balance printed on their receipt. I was nosey a few times and recall seeing over $1000 on one customer's balance.
Either they weren't using the food stamps, or were getting a lot more than $50 per person.
At that time, I was making less than 10,000 per year. Of course, I got all of the income tax back, but I was still paying FICA.
I don't care if the taxes I pay go to help people in need. However, I feel used when these people abuse it. Crablegs and a $40 cake? Why can't they buy something cheaper? Being on food stamps means you don't even have enough to feed yourself or your family, something that even wild animals can do. You shouldn't be eating expensive foods.
These same people would use the cash back option on their food stamps to pay for booze, cigarettes, and other toiletries. I called the state asking about the legality of this and they stated that people are rarely punished.
Better question.
Why do roughly half of adult households in the country earn so little that they do not pay any federal income tax
No. The reason that about half of adults in this country do not pay federal income taxes is because the majority of them are unemployed. There are some that do work but don't pay taxes due to income which isn't terribly surprising given the huge number of deductions, exemptions, and refundable credits available for various and sundry things which quickly phase out as income rises. But it's mostly due to not working and I'll show you that below.
The labor force participation rate is the percentage of all civilians who can legally work, meaning over age 16 and not institutionalized who either are currently working or are unemployed less than 6 months. That number is 62.8% according to the most recent April 2014 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Table A-1. Employment status of the civilian population by sex and age) Yes, this includes retired people and that skews the usage of that figure as a proxy for unemployment to some degree (see a better explanation below in my next paragraph.) But it works very well for the purpose of explaining why there are a lot of non-taxpayers out there. You have 37.2% of the population of legal working age not having worked for >6 months. You furthermore have 6.3% of the legal working age individuals currently out of work but unemployed for <6 months so they are not earning money either. So that gives a total of 43.5% of the legal working age individuals not working. The figure was that 47% of federal tax filers pay no taxes. Hmm, the numbers sure look like most people who state they are working are in fact paying federal income taxes. That's been my experience. I haven't had to earn very much to start having to pay taxes (e.g. refund less than amount withheld) and as you earn more, you pay a TON more in taxes.
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especially considering that over 85% of working age adults are employed.
Not even close. The BLS site has a wealth of information and part of that is employment by age (and sex, race, educational attainment, etc. etc.) Tables A-1 and A-6 on the site has that information although you have to separately add up and subtract from several columns worth of numbers on those pages to arrive at the figures. There are 202,800,000 people between the ages of 16 and 64 and legally able to work and there are 44,638,000 people 65 and older (even then, 8.5 million of the over-65s still work.) 137,722,000 of the 16-64 group are employed, giving us an employment rate of only 67.9% of working-age individuals. If you remove individuals with disabilities from that total, you get a total of 187,338,000 people, of whom 133,812,000 are employed for a total employment rate of 71.4% of working-age adults. Even additionally throwing out numbers for people under 20 because a lot of those are high school and college students and many aren't expected to work during that time (although I certainly did and 4.5 million in that age range currently do work), that is 170,686,000 people between 20 and 64, of whom 133,243,000 are employed for an employment ratio of only 78.1%. That's 22% of able-bodied adults (37.4 million) who are not in school and not of retirement age are are still not working. That's pitiful and much less than what you guessed. It also shows that there are roughly as many people 20-64 not working as there are people over 65 not working so don't think I am overly skewing the figures with retirees either.
That specific information is not possible to find as the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a different department and obtains solely individual data while the IRS is concerned mainly with number of returns. The only information I could find that even dealt with number of people per tax return was Table 2.4 on the IRS tax stats page which lists number of exemptions per type of return. (http://www.irs.gov/file_source/pub/irs-soi/11in24ms.xls) This makes no determination of if they are adult or not or what their ages are.
I had to make an assumption because the information you want is not published and would require the probably prohibited sharing of personal information between at least two federal agencies. My assumption was the number of tax returns is quite proportional to the number of employed and unemployed individuals in the country. Homemakers are uncommon in married couples and the large number of filers who are individual filers are obviously directly correlated with the BLS data on a 1:1 basis. So I don't think I am way off the mark in making my assumptions about unemployment and not paying taxes. Feel free to try to obtain high-quality reliable data from a credible source if you have it. I await it with bated breath from somebody who made an obviously incorrect (and easily *correctly* calculated) completely un-cited assertion about the number of working-age adults who are unemployed.
Last edited by Flyover_Country; 05-24-2014 at 06:18 PM..
Census tracks this. In fact, it is the same survey the BLS uses for their numbers. (the ACS) American FactFinder - Results *
Of 83,713,323 multi-person households (which are not necessarily family households, but the closest you are going to get with census data) in the US, 15,683,792 (19%) contained no workers.
So I was wrong, it is only 81% of families have a worker in their household. (Though this figure includes retiree households no longer of working age too.)
28,994,201 contained one worker. (35%)
32,085,730 contained two workers. (38%)
6,949,600 contained three or more workers. (8%)
To be a worker under the census definition, you must be employed.
This means a huge chunk of those households who pay no taxes are employed and currently working.
Census tracks this. In fact, it is the same survey the BLS uses for their numbers. (the ACS) American FactFinder - Results *
Of 83,713,323 multi-person households (which are not necessarily family households, but the closest you are going to get with census data) in the US, 15,683,792 (19%) contained no workers.
So I was wrong, it is only 81% of families have a worker in their household. (Though this figure includes retiree households no longer of working age too.)
28,994,201 contained one worker. (35%)
32,085,730 contained two workers. (38%)
6,949,600 contained three or more workers. (8%)
You mentioned that 85% of all working-age adults were employed and I used THE primary source on the matter to disprove that assertion, and by quite a bit as well. It was only about 2/3 of that population and even when all but the absolute prime no-reason-not-to-be-able-to-work people were thrown out of the calculation it was still only in the 70s% range.
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To be a worker under the census definition, you must be employed.
This means a huge chunk of those households who pay no taxes are employed and currently working.
No. I did all of the exclusions of people who were under 20 and over 65 and "not generally expected to work full time" in my calculations. You clearly admit your figures don't account for those people and they certainly do skew the figures as something like 12 million people in that age range do work at least some. A student or retired person working part time to earn a little "spending money" doesn't earn that much money but may or may not be considered "economically disadvantaged" or whatever the current PC buzzword is because of their overall economic situation which is rarely well-represented on their income tax form. I'll give you a great example. An elderly individual who works a little to get out of the house and earn a few thousand a year in "spending money" will appear dirt poor on their 1040 but may have millions in assets that they can draw upon if they need to and likely has zippo in debt, so their costs are essentially utilities, food, insurance (which is limited to a low multiple of what a healthy young man pays), and a few other miscellaneous costs. A new doctor with a $150k income you'd consider "filthy rich" because their AGI would be high even though they are paying $60k/year in taxes and $60k/year in government monopoly student loans to pay them back in the prescribed 10-year-after-graduation-plan (and thus living on a below-median $30k/year) and also has a mortgage and a car payment to boot, unlike the oldster. But the oldster is "poor" because of a low income (no matter that they have a lot of assets and no debt) and the new doc is "rich" because of a higher income, despite a huge debt and high tax payments taking their money.
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This doesn't even come close to meshing up with the
Meshing up with the what? Your statements meshing up with the truth? Sounds right to me!
As long as the bill doesn't include making I-70 a toll road or any other highway in this state a toll road, then, as a taxpayer myself, I am fine with the new sales tax.
Lord knows Missouri doesn't need to become another right wing extremist paradise like Texas, where the only solution to transportation funding woes is privately funded toll roads.
You mentioned that 85% of all working-age adults were employed and I used THE primary source on the matter to disprove that assertion, and by quite a bit as well. It was only about 2/3 of that population and even when all but the absolute prime no-reason-not-to-be-able-to-work people were thrown out of the calculation it was still only in the 70s% range.
It is not the primary source.
The Census ACS is the primary source and the BLS uses an abstract from that.
The Census ACS figures contradict what you are asserting. I was wrong as well, by 4%.
You were wrong by far more than that, mostly because you continue to talk about individuals while I am talking about households.
It is not the primary source.
The Census ACS is the primary source and the BLS uses an abstract from that.
The Census ACS figures contradict what you are asserting. I was wrong as well, by 4%.
You were wrong by far more than that, mostly because you continue to talk about individuals while I am talking about households.
No. Your original assertion was that "over 85% of working age adults are employed." Go back and read your post. You were making a reference to individuals there. I obtained and analyzed the data about individuals and it was nowhere near 85% of them are employed even after removing a significant number of confounders such as likely students, people on disability, and people over 65. Now you're saying that the Census survey that states that 81% of households have somebody in that household who works proves your point of "over 85% of working age adults are employed." Who's confusing individuals and households here?
I thought about it some more and your requirement to have *no* workers in a household in order for you to think that unemployment is the main cause of lack of taxation is still not correct. Able-bodied adults of working age in the U.S. are all expected to work and the tax code is set up to tax two-worker households much more heavily than one where only one person works due to how exemptions and deductions work. That exemption policy works in reverse too- if you have another nonworking person in your house and you work, you have more exemptions and have a lower AGI than if that person were not there. So the unemployed person reduces the taxes paid by the person who works. Thus the number of unemployed individuals is still highly related to the number of tax returns with no federal taxes being paid.
The exemption bit also plays a large role in taxation as well. The IRS admits that the bulk of taxes are paid on returns of married people where both work because of that. You pay more taxes being married with two workers if your spouse earns more than ~$7k or so compared to if you were not married and each of you filed as single. The marriage rate continues to decrease and thus you'll see fewer (married) households pay a larger percentage of the total taxes as time goes on due to the marriage penalty. My opinion is that federal income taxes should be calculated based only on an individual's income. Married couples would calculate their AGIs separately. Any deductions and credits would be split equally between the two except in cases of fractional custody, etc. as they are now between divorced filers. Then you'd run those numbers individually through the single set of tax tables that would be used for all filers. That would additionally not reduce the tax burden of the working person in a household if their spouse does not work.
Last edited by Flyover_Country; 05-25-2014 at 08:21 AM..
As long as the bill doesn't include making I-70 a toll road or any other highway in this state a toll road, then, as a taxpayer myself, I am fine with the new sales tax.
Lord knows Missouri doesn't need to become another right wing extremist paradise like Texas, where the only solution to transportation funding woes is privately funded toll roads.
As a right-leaning person, I find Texas to be rather ridiculous when it comes to infrastructure and zoning. The most poorly executed road system out there, I think. Their state roads are a cruel joke.
For whatever reason, it has become the poster child for conservative politics, but not all of us like it and some find it to be a bit of an embarrassment when it comes to stuff like this.
I think toll roads are good for the most part as long as they're part of a good, cohesive system. I also like it when they share something like E-ZPass/Prepass to streamline interstate travel and commerce. Texas and Oklahoma do their own thing, which makes it more... annoying.
I do see tolls as a viable funding option for interstates and main thoroughfares like 13/7 in Missouri.
MO has pretty good roads, comparatively speaking. MODot does a very good at building roads quickly and keeping them maintained pretty well. Do they need more money? If so, then a little bit more of a gas tax or tolls seem like the way to go. Let the people who use them most pay for them.
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