Your Opinion: Everyone is getting poorer

Dear Editor:

How many times have you heard someone, including our president, say that "they should not be paying a lower effective tax rate than a teacher. Somebody who's making $50,000 a year as a teacher shouldn't be paying a higher effective tax rate than somebody like me. Well Fact check.org has evaluated this statement and found the following:

A single taxpayer with $50,000 of income would have paid 11.9 percent in federal income taxes for 2010, while the Obamas paid more than twice that rate 25.3 percent and higher rates than that in 2009 and 2008. And if the $50,000 a year teacher were in Obama's tax situation, supporting a spouse and two children, he or she would have paid no federal income taxes at all.

From 2009 IRS figures and a little story at the Wall Street Journal: "Recession And The Rich, the number of taxpayers reporting annual income over $1 million fell 39 percent between 2007 and 2009." This coincides with when Pelosi took over the House and Obama took over the White House.

The number of super wealthy individuals making over $10 million annually plunged 55 percent. This wasn't confined to just millionaires, as the number of taxpayers earning over $200,000 per year also decreased by 612,000 or 13 percent.

Everybody's getting poorer. Four in 10 millionaires disappeared in two years. In 2007, those making above $200,000, but less than $1 million, paid $610 billion in federal income taxes. In 2009, it was only $434 billion. So there is a war on the rich and class envy is working. There are fewer millionaires and super millionaires than there used to be and yet, people are still ranting and raving and moaning about all the rich people. So under Obama, the rich are getting poorer, and so are the poor.

Now, according to Democrats, the only reason that rich people exist is because they steal money from the poor.

So you figure if all these millionaires are being taken down a peg and there are significantly fewer millionaires, there would be a lot more rich poor people, right?

It's not happening and I wonder why that is? Well, who's getting all the money, then? Government is getting the money, and they're defining wealth down, they're defining rich down, but the poor are still poor.