Weighing the tax burden.

ITEM: "It's budget season in Washington, and this year there is some welcome substance to the usual prattle about fiscal discipline and responsibility," commented the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger for April 3. "Democrats in both the House and the Senate are making a pay-as-you-go mandate central to their $2.9 trillion budget plans, meaning any spending increases or tax cuts have to be paid for either with spending cuts or tax increases."

Chastising the Democrats mildly for not providing "relief" from the so-called Alternative Minimum Tax that was "enacted to make sure the rich pay at least something," the Star-Ledger nonetheless concluded by praising the Democrats.

ITEM: David Abromowitz and Joan Ruttenberg, identified as lawyers and members of the group called Responsible Wealth, wrote in the Boston Globe for April 9 that not enough Americans are sacrificing economically during wartime. "In past wars, those who could most afford to pay did so. During World War II, marginal tax rates on the wealthy reached over 90 percent. During wars in Korea and Vietnam, and throughout the Cold War, the most fortunate among us contributed almost as heavily to the national effort, paying at marginal rates of over 50 percent. Economic sacrifices were shared. But now the Bush White House insists that those making $300,000 and up--already paying the lowest tax rates in 50 years--needn't bother to pay a penny more toward national needs."

Their cure is to "bring back a 40 percent marginal tax rate on high incomes ... until this war [in Iraq] is over."

CORRECTION: Marginal tax rates of 90 percent, or half that, don't seem like the good old days to most Americans. Plus, such taxation would be futile for many reasons, not the least of which is that the big spenders in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, invariably manage to spend every dollar they can lay their hands on--and more. Accordingly, war or no war, there always would be another "emergency" to devour the funds.

The Democrats prefer to place the blame for deficit spending on the Bush tax cuts, not on too much spending. The truth is otherwise. As Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation has noted: "Critics tirelessly contend that America's swing from budget surpluses in 1998-2001 to a $247 billion budget deficit in 2006 resulted chiefly from the 'irresponsible' Bush tax cuts. This argument ignores the historic spending increases that pushed federal spending up from 18.5 percent of GDP in 2001 to 20.2 percent in 2006."

And contrary to much propaganda, even with the Bush tax cuts (which the Democrats want to expire), total federal revenues have gone up substantially, and the results of the tax cuts have shifted even more of the tax burden to the wealthiest Americans. Indeed, in 2000, before those dreaded rate cuts, the top quintile of earners paid 66.6 percent of all federal taxes, according to Congressional Budget Office figures, and that moved up to 67.1 percent in 2004; the share paid by the bottom quintile over that same period fell from 5.9 percent to 5.4 percent.

Yet Democrats keep saying that we have to tax the rich. Guess what? There aren't enough "rich" to soak to keep up with the deluge of federal spending. When do-gooders say they want to hit up the rich to help the poor, they are really aiming at the broad middle class because that is where the money is. The nonpartisan Tax Foundation routinely maps tax burdens and related issues, including details about who really is footing most of the bill. Americans making $60,000 or more a year pay some 85 percent of all federal taxation, notes the Tax Foundation, yet that group receives only about 66 cents for every federal tax dollar extracted. The top one percent pays more than 10 times the amount that the entire bottom 50 percent pays in federal income taxes. (This is why tax cuts frequently don't go to "the poor"; that group effectively pays no federal income taxes in the first place.)

A Tax Foundation study, dated March 2007, compares who is paying and who is receiving benefits from government spending. The study divides the population into five groups, or quintiles, of "household cash money income" as follows: bottom 20 percent, under $23,700; second 20 percent, $23,701-$42,304; third 20 percent, $42,305-$65,000; fourth 20 percent, $65,001-$99,502; and top 20 percent, over $99,502. The study found:

Overall, households in the bottom three quintiles are net beneficiaries from tax and spending policies. They received more than one dollar of government spending for every dollar of taxes they paid in 2004. In contrast, households in the top two quintiles are net fiscal payers, receiving less than one dollar of government spending for every tax dollar paid to governments.

When all government spending is included, households in the lowest quintile received about $8.21 in spending for every dollar of taxes paid. Households in the middle quintile received $1.30, and households in the top quintile received $0.41.

At the federal level, government spending and taxes are much more unevenly distributed than at the state and local level. America's bottom income group received $14.76 of federal spending for every dollar of taxes they send to Washington, compared to the $1.29 for the middle quintile and just $0.32 for America's highest earners. State and local public finances also provide substantial benefits to lower-income households, but not to the same degree.

The inauguration of the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) is instructive in showing what happens when the government says it is only going to tax really rich folks and, lo and behold, the levy turns out to be aimed at you. The AMT was devised about four decades ago when President Lyndon Johnson's Treasury secretary found about 21 millionaires who had legally paid little or no income taxes in 1967. An uproar resulted and a new tax was born. It is supposed to apply to the rich, insuring that they would pay a minimum amount of federal taxes regardless of how many deductions they might claim. Predictably, the AMT applied to more and more people as incomes grew in response to inflation. And what was supposed to be a tax on the rich has become a tax on many middle-class Americans. Without action by Congress, about 23 million Americans will be subject to the "rich man's tax" this year, or about one in every four Americans who files taxes. It could affect those making $50,000.

Neither Democrats nor Republicans have come up with anything close to a reasonable solution to the problems caused by the AMT. The Treasury Department claims that scrapping the AMT would "cost" the government about $1.2 trillion over 10 years, and of course both parties would rather spend that money than leave it with the folks who earned it. The GOP failed to do much with this issue when they had a congressional majority. And proposed Democratic "solutions" thus far are tied to their vaunted pay-as-you-go gimmick--which in reality means that if a tax is cut it must be replaced with a matching increase elsewhere.

In 2005, the federal government siphoned $2.4 trillion from the American population, in income taxes and other levies. "To put this number in context," writes columnist Bruce Bartlett, "it is about the size of the entire U.S. economy in 1959 in inflation-adjusted terms. Only two other countries on Earth have economies as large as our federal government: Germany and Japan--and Germany just barely makes the cut, with a gross domestic product of $2.7 trillion."

But our government still spends even more than it takes in, having tripled federal spending since 1990--thus adding to our deficit. Or, as Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) puts it, "We could cut spending by two-thirds and still have a federal government as large as it was in 1990." And keep in mind that federal income taxes, while a huge drag on the economy, are only 26 percent of the total tax bill in the United States.

Meanwhile, Americans have been forced to work every day from the beginning of the year until April 30 to make enough money to be able to pay their annual taxes. It's odd: no matter how staggering taxes are, they rarely seem to fall down.