About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


1 Andrew Chamberlain & Gerald Prante, Which Taxes Weigh Most Heavily on Americans with Different Incomes 1 (2007)

handle is hein.taxfoundation/ffiaxz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: TAX FOUNDATION March 26, 2007 Which Taxes Weigh Most Heavily on Americans with Different Incomes? by Andrew Chamberlain and Gerald Prante Fiscal Fact No. 80 With the April 17 tax deadline looming, Americans are focused on federal income taxes. But what's often overlooked in the rush toward the filing deadline is that income taxes, while important, are just one of many taxes borne by American households each year. Payroll, property, sales, excise, estate and other taxes also add to Americans' tax burdens. And for Americans with low and middle incomes, these non-income taxes commonly make up a bigger slice of their annual tax bill than the federal income taxes they pay to the IRS each April. Federal Income Taxes: Just One Among Many In 2004, Americans paid about $3 trillion in taxes. That's $26,738 per household. Of that, $17,338 was paid to the federal government in Washington, and $9,400 went to state and local governments at home. While the media spotlight shines on federal income taxes each April, many Americans may be surprised to learn that federal income taxes make up only 26 percent of the nation's total tax bill. The remaining 74 percent--nearly three-fourths of the U.S. economy's total tax burden--is comprised of the other federal, state and local taxes paid by American households every year. How do federal income taxes stack up to other taxes? Figure 1 gives some perspective. It shows every major type of tax in the United States that is recorded by the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. To make the numbers easy to understand, we've presented them on a per-household basis. That is, we've divided total collections for each type of tax by the number of American households, which was about 113.5 million in 2004. As Figure 1 clearly illustrates, while federal income taxes consume a sizable part of the nation's tax bill, they're not the only drain on households' finances.