GOP Can’t Handle The Truth: Taxes Are Lower Under Obama Than Reagan

By Pat Garofalo

President Obama met with House Republicans today at the White House to discuss ways to move forward on negotiations regarding the nation’s debt ceiling and the budget. During the discussion, talk evidently turned to taxes, and when Obama noted that taxes today are lower than they were under President Reagan, the GOP, according to The Hill, “engaged in a lot of ‘eye-rolling’“:

Republicans attending a White House meeting on Wednesday didn’t take kindly to President Obama telling them tax rates were higher during the Reagan administration. GOP members engaged in a lot of “eye-rolling,” according to a member who was on hand to hear Obama, who invited House Republicans to the White House for discussions on the debt ceiling. [...]

“[The President] made a comment like the tax rate is the lightest, even more than (under former President) Reagan,” Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told The Hill following the meeting. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) joked that during the meeting, “We learned we had the lowest tax rates in history … lower than Reagan!”

That House Republicans find this preposterous is symptomatic of the hold Reagan mythology has over them. After all, for seven of Regan’s eight years in office, the top tax rate was higherthan the current 35 percent. In six of those years, it was 50 percent or more. And every year that Regan was in office, the bottom tax bracket was higher than the current ten percent.

For a family of four, the “average income tax rate under Reagan in 1983 was 11.06 percent. Under Clinton in 1992, it was 9.18 percent. And under Obama in 2010, it was 4.68 percent.” During Reagan’s time, income tax revenue ranged from 7.8 to 9.4 percent of GDP. Last year, it was 6.2 percent and is not projected to climb back to 9 percent until 2016. In fact, in 2009, Americans paid their lowest taxes in 60 years.

Republicans are very fond of saying that the U.S. has “a spending problem, not a revenue problem.” But the truth is that revenue has plunged due to the recession and to continued misguided tax cuts, and revenue needs to be raised to eventually bring the budget into balance. And Reagan knew that taxes were an important part of the budget equation. After all, he “raised taxes in seven of his eight years in office,” including four times in just two years.

U.S. Taxes At Lowest Level Since 1958

By Pat Garofalo 

According to congressional Republicans and Tea Partiers,Americans are already overtaxed and contemplating any increase in government revenue, even from the richest Americans, would be unfair. “How high do taxes have to go to satisfy the appetite of people in this Congress to spend money?” asked Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) this week. However, the numbers show that the economic recession and a decade of tax cuts have resulted in some of the lowest taxes of the post-war period. According to a new USA Today analysis, personal taxes — including federal and local — are at their lowest level since 1958:

Americans are paying the smallest share of their income for taxes since 1958, a reflection of tax cuts and a weak economy, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

The total tax burden — for all federal, state and local taxes — dropped to 23.6% of income in the first quarter, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data.

As McClatchy’s Kevin Hall wrote yesterday, “At a time when Washington is wrestling with how to end federal budget deficits and trim the national debt — huge questions that are expected to dominate the nation’s politics through the 2012 elections — thefact that Americans are under-taxed compared with U.S. historic norms is central to the discussion.” The USA Today analysis shows that if tax receipts today were at the level they were through the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s, that would eliminate “one-third of the estimated $1.5 trillion federal deficit this year.”