[seodiary]

Orange County Register: http://www.ocregister.com/news/-117079-ocprint--.html

While Republican lawmakers appear unified against tax increases and many Tea Party activists want existing rates rolled back, statistics consistently show that federal taxes are at a historic low.

For the past two years, a family of four earning the median income has paid less in federal income taxes than at any time since at least 1955, according to the Tax Policy Center. All federal, state and local taxes combined are a lower percentage of per-capita income than at any time since the 1960s, according to the Tax Foundation. The highest income-tax bracket is its lowest since 1992. At 35 percent, it's well below the 50 percent mark of much of the 1980s and the 70 percent bracket of the 1970s.

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There's this impression that there's a colossal tax burden and that's not really the case,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor at Cal State Fullerton. “But if you're really angry at the government, you're going to think taxes are too high.”

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Federal income-tax cuts intended to stimulate the economy were launched under George W. Bush – including the Recovery Rebate Credit of 2008 – and continued under Barack Obama with the Making Work Pay tax credit approved by Congress in February 2009 and the current 2 percent payroll tax reduction signed into law in December.

Those lower taxes have helped give the U.S. government the lowest revenues as a percentage of gross domestic product of seven industrialized countries surveyed in 2010 by the Congressional Research Services. (The other countries were Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France.) The U.S. also had the lowest spending as a percentage of the GDP.

But with the biggest gap between revenues (31.6 percent of GDP) and expenditures (42.2 percent of GDP), the U.S. also posted the largest deficit as a percentage of GDP – 10.5 percent.

The U.S. could close the annual deficit immediately by simply raising taxes – and still come in at a lower tax rate than Germany, Italy and France. But that's not an argument that goes over well with Tea Party activists – whose name stands for Taxed Enough Already.