Action America Analyzes New IRS Collections Data

The official IRS Collections Data for 2003 has just become available and Action America has published our annual analysis of that data in an article titled 1985-2003 IRS Collections Data by Income Category

Here is just a sample of what's in that report.

• The top-earning 1% of taxpayers earned 16.77% of the income.
• The top-earning 1% of taxpayers paid 34.27% of the tax collected.
• That's more than double their share, based upon income.

If nothing else, this report shows that the Bush tax cuts didn't benefit the rich, as liberals would have us believe. In fact, 2002 and 2003 were the first years since 1996 that the top-earning 1% paid more than double their share of taxes, based upon income. So in fact, the top earners paid a larger percentage of the taxes that were actually collected in the two years after the Bush tax cuts, than in the years leading up to those tax cuts.

But there is a lot more to it than just that. Check out the article for more analysis and a link to the actual data, in spreadsheet format, on the IRS web site. Afterwards, come back here and discuss it.

Note: Every year, between October and February, the IRS releases their most recent collections data. Because of the time it takes to complete collections and to compile the data, the released data is always about two years old.