Income tax in the United States

The chaps at Wikipedia have a nice article on the US Income tax: Income tax in the United States, and very good one it is.

But the article only had a partial table of income tax rates.  Until now.  Yes now you can go and look at the history of income tax rates over at Wikipedia, courtesy of the tax research experts here at Road to the Middle Class.  Here’s a sneak preview. If you’d like.

Partial History of U.S. Federal Income Tax Rates Since 1913
Applicable Year	Income brackets	First bracket	Top bracket	Source
1913-1915	-	1%	7%	Census
1916	-	2%	15%	Census
1917	-	2%	67%	Census
1918	-	6%	73%	Census
1919-1920	-	4%	73%	Census
1921	-	4%	73%	Census
1922	-	4%	56%	Census
1923	-	3%	56%	Census
1924	-	1.5%	46%	Census
1925-1928	-	1.5%	25%	Census
1929	-	0.375%	24%	Census
1930-1931	-	1.125%	25%	Census
1932-1933	-	4%	63%	Census
1934-1935	-	4%	63%	Census
1936-1939	-	4%	79%	Census
1940	-	4.4%	81.1%	Census
1941	-	10%	81%	Census
1942-1943	-	19%	88%	Census
1944-1945	-	23%	94%	Census
1946-1947	-	19%	86.45%	Census
1948-1949	-	16.6%	82.13%	Census
1950	-	17.4%	84.36%	Census
1951	-	20.4%	91%	Census
1952-1953	-	22.2%	92%	Census
1954-1963	-	20%	91%	Census
1964	-	16%	77%	Census
1965-1967	-	14%	70%	Census
1968	-	14%	75.25%	Census
1969	-	14%	77%	Census
1970	-	14%	71.75%	Census
1979	15 brackets	14%	70%	IRS
1982	12 brackets	12%	50%	IRS
1987	5 brackets	11%	38.5%	IRS
1988	3 brackets	15%	33%	IRS
1991	3 brackets	15%	31%	IRS
1993	5 brackets	15%	39.6%	IRS
2001	5 brackets	15%	39.1%	IRS
2002	6 brackets	10%	38.6%	IRS
2003-2006	6 brackets	10%	35%	IRS

What a tale of woe!  And what a lot of tinkering.  Why can’t our Solons just set the tax rates low and leave them alone!

In Guatemala Today

In the highlands of Guatemala it’s one volcano after another.  Of course, they are all extinct.  For now.  And the tourist hotels are conveniently located to give a good view of the nearby volcano.  Volcanoes do look cute—until it rains an they let loose a mudslide.

Since Guatemala has been a pawn in US politics over recent decades, with poster girl Rigoberta Menchu as a victim of US imperialism, you have to go there to get a decent picture of what it’s really like.

And what it’s really like is a country in the middle of the flight from the land.  Guatemala City is growing like mad, up to 3.5 million in a country of 14 million, and the “chicken buses” (converted US school buses) race up and down the Panamerican Highway at top speed from Chichicastenanga in the rural Mayan heartland to Guatemala City and back and for less than a buck a ride.

It’s like any third world country.  Part rural, with women wearing traditional clothes, and part urban with restless young men driving around like maniacs.

And it’s ten years since the government and the rebels signed a peace treaty ending 30 years of civil war.  Which is about par for the course.  They say that your average serious civil war takes about thirty years, enough to consume two generations of hot-heads in the refiner’s fire of war.

Today there are horrific tales of armed robberies in Guatemala City, and stern warnings from guides about pickpockets in the market.  But people are building and working and going to school in Guatemala.  It’s the restless energy of humankind that cannot be denied for long.

No Child Left Behind. End It or Mend It?

Don’t blame me, says conservative elder Paul Weyrich.  “I opposed NCLB from the beginning.”  All it does is add a layer of bureaucracy.  And the study from Cato Institute, “End It, Don’t Mend It: What To Do With No Child Left Behind,”  seems to back him up.

[W]hile both 4th- and 8th-grade math scores rose between 2003 and 2005 (the only period during which score changes could be attributed to NCLB), the rate of improvement actually slowed from that achieved between 2000 and 2003, a period before NCLB was enacted and implemented in schools. "In reading," CATO’s report notes, "the results were worse, with the period covered by NCLB seeing a score decline for 8th graders and stagnation for 4th graders, following improvement between 2000 and 2002."

As always, usgovernmentspending.com rides to the rescue on this, because it lets us look at the full cost of education in this country. 

United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2008
Amounts in billions of dollars

	Pensions:	$910.0
	Health Care:	$916.5
	Education:	$836.7
	Defense:	$692.0
	Welfare:	$436.4
	Protection:	$296.6
	Transportation:	$240.5
	General Government:	$103.1
	Interest:	$348.1
	All Other Spending:	$301.1
	Total Spending:	$5081.1

source: usgovernmentspending.com

There it is, $836.7 billion on government education in 2008.  when we are barely teaching kids to read and write and half of kids going into community college need remedial courses, surely we should be asking: what’s the point?

Our liberal friends are all exercised right now because the Iraq War is going to cost $1.6 trillion when you factor in all the indirect costs.

Education costs $1.6 trillion every two years.  And what do we get for it?

A Tale of Two Narratives

How’s the American family?  Time to write the obituary yet?  According to a recent Brookings Institution report, writes Maggie Gallagher, not too bad.

Two-thirds of us who were children in the late-1960s have grown up to earn more (adjusted for inflation) than our own parents did at the same age. By 2006 the median family income of the adults in this study was $71,900, up 29 percent compared to the median income of their parents in 1968.

The report, “Economic Mobility of Black and White Families,” by Julia B. Isaacs, does point up some major societal problems, of course.  These studies always do.

I know what you are thinking:  “World Ends, women and minorities hardest hit.”  Good try.

In fact the story of the last generation is that the income of white women has soared, and the income of black women has increased substantially. 

The story on the male side is not so good.  White male income has stagnated, and black male income has gone down.  I’m not sure how you reduce that to a sound bite.

If you read the executive summary of Isaac’s report over at Brookings, you find the usual de-familied jargon, except for this:

The lack of income growth for black men combined with low marriage rates in the black population has had a negative impact on trends in family income for black families.

But more research is needed to get better longitudinal information of minority families.

In Gallagher’s review of the study, things are not quite so soothing.  She is, after all, a marriage advocate.

For her, one thing comes out starkly: the collapse of the black family.  With 25 percent of white children born outside of wedlock you can say we have a problem.  With 70 percent of black children born outside of wedlock...  Well, what would you expect?

Obviously, you will say, in that environment, we should expect severe problems in the black male community.

Here’s how the data come out.

Race/Gender 1974 Median Income 2004 Median Income Change White Women $4,021 $22,030 +448% Black Women $12,065 $21,000 +74% White Men $41,885 $40,081 -4% Black Men $29,085 $25,600 -12%

Not too pretty, is it?  What has happened over the last generation is that white women have come out of the unpaid sector into the paid sector and they have elbowed everyone else aside, white men most notably and black men most particularly.

The fact is that when men are not harnessed into the role of husband and provider they go down rather quickly.  They work less, they live less healthy lives, and they don’t contribute much to society.

You could look it up.

Income Mobility

Our friends at the Wall Street Journal edit page (not to be confused with the lefties in the Journal newsroom) have spent a lot of energy over the years refuting the Two Nations concept first enunciated 160 years ago by conservative Benjamin Disraeli.  You know how it goes in his novel Sybil, or The Two Nations:

Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy... the rich and the poor.

The image presented is of two separate enties, like Kipling’s east and west—ne’er the twain shall meet.  Actually (and I’m half way through it, so can’t be sure how it turns out) it looks like the angelic (but poor) Sybil may have noble blood in her veins.  It seems likely that she was cheated out of her birthright by the evil Whig landowners who despoiled the monasteries in the 16th century.

But what if the two, the rich and the poor, are mixing it up, with the poor rising into the middle class and the rich falling away from their riches?  It rather spoils the Two Nations narrative, that’s what it does.

In an unsigned editoral the Journal folks point up a US Treasury study on income mobility released today.  It is a “longitudinal study,” following the experience of actual taxpayers over a ten year period.  Here’s a link to “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005” (pdf).  It paints a picture of remarkable, persistent income mobility. 

What about people at the bottom of the income pyramid?  How did they do?

Those who start at the bottom but hold full-time jobs nonetheless enjoyed steady income gains. The Treasury study found that those tax filers who were in the poorest income quintile in 1996 saw a near doubling of their incomes (90.5%) over the subsequent decade.

That’s quite something.  Guess who ended up worst off?  That’s right: the rich.

Only one income group experienced an absolute decline in real income—the richest 1% in 1996. Those households lost 25.8% of their income. Moreover, more than half (57.4%) of the richest 1% in 1996 had dropped to a lower income group by 2005.

Rather spoils the fun doesn’t it?

But the message is unmistakable.  The United States is not a still, stratified lake, but a churning, turbulent river.  And, not surprisingly, there is a definite reversion to the mean.  People who are rich have a good chance of losing out.  People who are poor have a decent chance of making it into the middle class.

And that’s how it should be.

Inventing the New Conservatism: Education

We conservatives are running around wondering what the new conservatism means.  And we at Road to the Middle Class are doing our part. You can read the latest effort here.  It’s a riff on David Cameron’s speech in Manchester on co-operatives.

The transplant American Janet Daley was listening to David Cameron too, and she’s just as jazzed as we are.  The argument that is slowly emerging into mainstream politics in this post-Clinton and post-Blair age is a big one.

It is nothing less than the question of who should have the real power in a free society - a government elected by the people, or the people themselves through their own direct agency.

Up to now it’s all been about generalities.  The pundits in their helpful way have been yelling for specifics and accusing Cameron of being a lightweight. 

But now we are seeing specifics, starting with education.  In the Cameron plan,

You and your neighbours who are fed up with inadequate local schools could band together and form a cooperative to open a school (or take over an existing one), and lay claim to the funding allowance which the state provides for the education of your children to finance it.

The argument against the plan, of course, is an old one.  It’s the paternalist pat on the head.  All very well for you, old sport, but what about the people who don’t have the ability to take advantage of the new system?  What about the people left behind?

What about those who will not, or cannot, take up the offer of real power because they are indifferent or benighted or so disadvantaged that the challenge is more than they can comprehend? Surely there must be uniform provision of schooling by the state precisely to balance this inequitable distribution of parental concern?

The answer is a simple one.

The point about community "cooperative" power is that not everybody has to participate actively for everybody to benefit from it.

It’s the same as consumer power in business.  You do not have to be a genius yourself to make cars or iPods or houses.  You can rely on other people to do that.  But the benefit of their work comes to you in the form of low prices and high quality, not to mention the rank-and-file jobs that are available to average people.

And, let us not forget, if you don’t like it you can get your money back.  Now there’s a concept!

So it could be in education and other social questions.  Activist parents and social entrepreneurs will set up the new institutions.  Average bears like you and me can then come along and take advantage of their work.

That’s not so hard is it?

Entitlements: Life is not a defined benefit

The GAO chappies issued a report on the nation’s entitlements recently, according to Star Parker.  They described the situation as a party on the beach while the “tsunami” gets ever closer.

You can get the same idea by taking a look at usgovernmentspending.com.  It shows unmistakably how big entitlement programs sit on top of the government spending pile, crowding everything else out. Here’s the story for 2008.

---

United States Federal, State,
and Local Government Spending
Fiscal Year 2008
Amounts in billions of dollars

Change View:		Fed	Gov. Xfer	State	Local	Total
Pensions		730.7	0.0	146.0	33.4	910.0
Health Care		672.3	-293.7	416.8	121.1	916.5
Education		92.8	-93.7	272.3	565.3	836.7
Defense		689.9	0.0	2.1	0.0	692.0
Welfare		262.7	-38.8	125.5	87.0	436.4
Protection		47.0	0.0	79.7	169.9	296.6
Transportation		79.3	-48.0	95.5	113.7	240.5
General Government		20.7	-0.8	32.4	50.8	103.1
Interest		261.3	0.0	37.4	49.4	348.1
All Other Spending		45.3	-48.0	15.2	288.6	301.1
Total Spending		2901.9	-523.0	1223.0	1479.2	5081.1
Spending: actual, budgeted, estimated, guesstimated source: usgovernmentspending.com

---

There they are, those three biggies: Pensions, Health Care, and Education, the big three entitlements that the government gives us for free, or in return for our taxes.

Parker has an interesting way of writing about this.  The welfare state treats life as a defined benefit, she says.

Trouble is, of course, it isn’t. Like the defined benefits that the auto workers voted themselves half a century ago, it’s all going to hit the buffers, because, not surprisingly, we voted for a lot more in defined benefit than we could ever afford.

But the entitlements crisis isn’t a government crisis, or an economic crisis. 

The entitlements crisis is a moral crisis and we ought to grasp that ownership is part of the "values" agenda. Life is not a defined benefit.

There is another way, of course, but we probably won’t get off the beach until it’s too late, like those vacationers unfortunate vacationsers in Phuket, Thailand, in December 2004.