newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BOB HOLT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

It’s income tax season again, but recent reports are saying that doesn’t matter to about half of the country.

Sussex County U.S. Rep. Scott Garrett said in a radio interview earlier this month that half of Americans aren’t paying income taxes. And it looks like statistics are backing his claim up.

According to PolitiFact New Jersey, a Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center report estimated that about 46.4 percent of households would pay no federal income tax for 2011. Roberton Williams of the Tax Center said about half of those were because the homes had no taxable income after subtracting standard deductions and personal exemptions.

Mail Online reported that only 50.5 percent of Americans paid income tax in 2009; the lowest total in about 50 years. They said 151.7 million Americans paid no taxes in 2009, while in 1984, 85 percent of Americans paid.

Heritage Foundation statistics show that 21.8 per cent of U.S. citizens, or a record total of 67.3 million, were getting financial assistance from the government.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the trend is a problem to the American republican form of government. Authors Bill Beach and Patrick Tyrrell wrote, “If the citizens’ representatives are elected by an increasing percentage of voters who pay no income tax, how long will it be before these representatives respond more to demands for yet more entitlements and subsidies from non-payers than to the pleas of taxpayers to exercise greater spending prudence?”

Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul supports getting the income tax rate as close to zero as possible. Paul said, according to the Christian Science Monitor, “There was a time in our history when we didn’t have income taxes. But when government takes it upon themselves to do so much, you have to have a tax code. As far as what the rates should be, I think it should be as low as possible for everybody.”