Middle Class Taxes at Historic Lows

Created: April 15, 2010 10:13 | Last updated: July 31, 2020 00:00

It’s tax day, meaning there will be no end to the rhetorical grandstanding from conservative lawmakers about how the Democrats’ “tax-and-spend” policies are stifling the economy and preventing average folks from achieving the American Dream.

Conveniently, they will ignore these new numbers from the Tax Policy Center, a joint project of the nonpartisan Urban Institute and Brookings Institution, which found that, however you slice them, federal taxes on the median middle-class family are just about at five-decade lows. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal policy group, explains:

This year, the Making Work Pay tax credit, which President Obama and Congress enacted as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is providing a credit of $800 to married joint filers ($400 to single filers). A median-income family with two children thus will receive an $800 tax cut in the return it files this year.

With the new tax cut, the median family’s federal income taxes will equal just 4.6 percent of its income in 2009. That is lower than in any year since 1955 (the first year for which these data are available) except for 2008, when another stimulus-related tax cut was in effect.

You think those numbers would be cheered by the Tea Party crowd. They haven’t been. Instead, you’ve got Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) taking to the chamber floor and condemning Democrats for “a budget with record taxes and spending that will add a trillion dollars to the national debt in the next ten years.”

They passed a national energy tax called cap and trade that will cause utility rates to go up on small businesses and family farms and businesses across this country by hundreds of billions of dollars. And we just passed ObamaCare with $600 billion of tax increases.

And it isn’t even noon yet.