EZ Policy Blog

Here is an interesting item from The Tax Foundation Blog:

IRS Publishes “Top 1%” Data by State — California’s Top 1% in the Crosshairs

by William Ahern

The IRS has shed some new light on the high-income Californians who are the targets of the state legislature’s tax-raising approach to budget balancing (IRS spreadsheet or Tax Foundation tabular summary).

By breaking out state-by-state its popular analysis of income and tax data, the IRS shows us that the top one percent of California taxpayers (150,000 people) — the same people who would pay the new, higher state tax rates of 10 percent, 11 percent and 12 percent — are already paying more in total federal income taxes than the 66 million people nationwide who make up the lower-earning half of US taxpayers.

California Republicans reject the tax-hike approach to budget balancing, and Governor Schwarzenegger has just thrown down the spending-cut gauntlet. He signed an order laying off temporary workers and withholding a portion of many other state employees’ salaries, starting at the end of the month unless the legislature sends him an already overdue budget.