Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year.
An estimated 45.3% of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.)
Roughly half pay no federal income tax because they have no taxable income, and the other roughly half get enough tax breaks to erase their tax liability, explains Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
Tomorrow is April 15, which means we are approaching the deadline for filing (and paying) our federal and state income taxes (extended to April 18 this year because of Emancipation Day), and that means it’s time for my annual post at tax time to help put things in perspective.
1. Some Historical Perspective. “In the beginning” when the US federal income tax was first introduced in 1913, it used to be a lot, lot simpler and a lot easier to file taxes; so easy in fact that it was basically like filling out your federal tax return on a postcard.
For example, page 1 of the original IRS 1040 income tax form from 1913 appears above. There were only four pages in the original 1040 form, including: two pages of worksheets, the actual one-page 1040 form above, and only one page of instructions, view all four pages here. In contrast, just the current 1040 instructions for 2014, without any forms, runs 105 pages (down from 207 pages for 2013).
Individual federal income tax rates started at 1% in 1913, and the maximum marginal income tax rate was only 7% on incomes above $500,000 ($12.02 million in today’s dollars). The personal exemption in 1913 was $3,000 for individuals ($72,000 in today’s dollars) and $4,000 for married couples ($96,000 in today’s dollars), meaning that very few Americans had to pay federal income tax since the average income in 1913 was only about $750. The Tax Foundation has historical federal income tax rates for every year between 1913 and 2013 here for tax brackets expressed in both nominal dollars and inflation-adjusted dollars.
Ridgewood NJ, Tax Day is here and the personal finance website WalletHub today released its Tax Day 2016 By The Numbers report, which features an infographic filled with fun facts as well as insights from a panel of leading tax experts.
You can find a handful of highlights below:
30.5 Minutes: Wait time for calls to the IRS in 2015.
62%: Of calls went unanswered in 2015.
6.1 Billion Hours: Time it takes Americans to do their taxes each year (16 hours per person).
35%: Of taxpayers would rather discuss sex with their kids than do their taxes.
27%: Of Americans would get an IRS tattoo to avoid taxes for life.
700%+: Increase in tax-related identity theft cases since 2010.
23%: Decrease in IRS enforcement staff since 2010.
Montvale NJ, Rep. Scott Garret addressed students at Saint Joseph Regional High School in Montvale about the role of Congress and the importance of financial literacy.
Garrett also toured some New Jersey Businesses in Bergen County were “precision” is the name of the game at Glebar Company a manufacturer of industrial equipment in Ramsey. Less precise, however, are the mountains of rules and regulations passed down from Washington, D.C. that bludgeon businesses here at home and depress hiring in New Jersey.
Garrett also stopped by Nova Electric in Bergenfield to discuss their business and the concerns many Americans are having about the state of the economy.
Then a trip to Wallkill Valley High School ‘Stuff the Bus’ full of food to help restock the shelves at the Sussex County food pantry. Local initiative always seems more effective the big government one size fits all programs .
Ridgewood NJ, Finally the Village of Ridgewood has now joined over two dozen other municipalities, including Teaneck, Englewood, Wayne, Paterson, Pequannock and North Bergen challenging the tax exempt status of their local hospital .
According to the Bergen Record ,”Valley’s 15 1/2-acre main campus would owe about $4.5 million in taxes if it were fully assessed, according to Michael Barker, the village tax assessor.”
Since a landmark ruling in 2015 stripped Morristown Medical Center of its property-tax exemption. Many towns in New Jersey have begun looking into stripping local non profit hospitals of their tax exempt status and for Ridgewood its about time !
Lets face it for many years Valley hospital have enjoyed the services that the Village of Ridgewood has provide to them. For example police and fire response to alarms, thefts investigation altercation.
Many readers do know that when other towns bring someone to the hospital they do not stay with the patient. If the patient becomes combative or unruly the Ridgewood police have to respond and remain until the situation is resolved.
Although not well publicized, theft from patients, Doctors and Valley Hospital do occur with some frequency. These incidents are investigated by the Ridgewood Police and are added to the reported crime statistics of Ridgewood.
The fact that Valley Hospital feels that they need to” Renew” or expand indicates that the response of the police and fire will only increase. If indeed Valley Hospital feels that they are part of the community then why not pay their fair share. Why would the Village of Ridgewood have to sue them for taxes .
It is time that all parties should sit down and settle this as a real community partners. The Village and the hospital would gain more credibility if this was done in transparent and fair way. Maybe it is time to put the past aside and make Valley a real partner in the community.
New Jersey tax collections will come in about $162.1 million short of Gov. Chris Christie’s expectations for the current and upcoming fiscal year, the nonpartisan Office of Legislative Services told lawmakers Tuesday. Samantha Marcus, NJ.comRead more
Ridgewood NJ, Tax Freedom Day, the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough to pay the federal, state, and local tax bill for year, will arrive 114 days into the year on April 24, according to the annual report released this morning by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation.
“Tax Freedom Day gives us a vivid representation of how much federal, state, and local tax revenue is collected each year to pay for government goods and services,” said Tax Foundation Analyst Scott Greenberg. “Arguments can be made that the tax bill is too high or too low, but in order to have an honest discussion, it’s important for taxpayers to understand the cost of government. Tax Freedom Day helps people relate to that cost.”
While the national date arrives nine days after the tax filing deadline, each state’s total federal, state, and local tax burden varies greatly. Tax Freedom Day arrives earliest in Mississippi (April 5), Tennessee (April 6), and Louisiana (April 7). On May 21, Connecticut will be the last state to reach Tax Freedom Day this year, while New Jersey (May 12) and New York (May 11) trail closely behind.
The report’s other key findings include:
This year, the national Tax Freedom Day falls on April 24, or 114 days into the year.
Collectively, Americans will spend more on taxes in 2016 than they will on food, clothing, and housing combined.
Americans will pay $3.3 trillion in federal taxes and $1.6 trillion in state and local taxes, for a total bill of almost $5.0 trillion, or 31 percent of the nation’s income.
Tax Freedom Day is one day earlier than last year, due mainly to the Protecting America from Tax Hikes Act of 2015, which made several business and individual tax cuts permanent.
If you include annual federal borrowing, which represents future taxes owed, Tax Freedom Day would occur 16 days later on May 10.
Historically, the date for Tax Freedom Day has fluctuated significantly. The latest-ever Tax Freedom Day was May 1, 2000 – meaning that Americans paid 33 percent of their collective incomes toward taxes. A century earlier, in 1900, only 5.9 percent of national income was required to pay the tax bill, and Tax Freedom Day fell January 22.
If you move away from your home state, some friends might throw you a party. Maybe you’ll get a happy-hour discount at your local bar.
If you’re really a big deal, you might get to throw out the first pitch at your local minor-league baseball team’s next game.
Other than that, everything will be pretty much the same after you’re gone.
That is, of course, unless you’re billionaire David Tepper.
If you are him, then when you move away you have the potential to send your whole state ( in this case New Jersey) into red-alert mode.
Tepper, the founder of the hedge fund Appaloosa Management, moved to Florida last fall. This, according to Bloomberg, has leaders of his former state very concerned.
Ridgewood NJ, Valley is a business first and foremost. They do not pay taxes, do minimal charity work and pay their execs millions.
As any time they can be acquired/sold to a large hospital system, making the execs even more money.
This expansion is an attempt to polish their brand, nice hospital in upscale setting. Who wouldn’t want to go there for elective surgery? They compete against hospitals in Bergen, Pasaic, Rockland, Westchester and Dutchess counties. The judge sais that he was looking out for the needs of the region not just the neighbors.
While the “common good” is often sighted as the reason for the Valley Expansion ,but in 2012 The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood did all they could to block HackensackUMC at Pascack Valley from opening .
It’s important for young East Side parents to understand how important this is. Your kids are little but this project will still be going on when they are in middle school. Think about that for a minute. Valley does NOT care about you our your kids. Their lawsuit against the Village claims that Ridgewood “acted capriciously” but putting the needs of Valley’s immediate neighbors (including Travell School and BF Middle School) above the needs of the region. Said a different way, any detriment to Valley’s immediate neighbors will be outweighed by their self proclaimed benefits to the broader region.
Ridgewood NJ, When looking at why the cost of living in New Jersey is so absurdly high, it is imperative to understand actual numbers for spending around the State.
Anyone following the proposed Atlantic City bankruptcy and/or takeover is probably trying to understand how Atlantic City got to this point. Most people are unaware that the population of Atlantic City consists of only 39,500 residents and 6,679 school age children. Yet, the municipal budget is $262,000,000 equaling spending of $26,531.64 per household of 4 people.
Likewise the school budget is $166,000,000 which equals an average spending of $24,887.56 per child. In other words, for a family of 4 with two school age children, the governmental and school spending in Atlantic City equals $76,306.76 per household. We must cut spending and figure out a better way. All of our futures depend on it.
we had to repeat this Trenton , Ridgewood , they are just not listening
By Matt Friedman | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
TRENTON — New Jersey’s state government would seek to better understand why companies are leaving the state under legislation approved by a Senate panel today.
The Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee voted 10-0 to approve the bill, which would require the state’s labor commissioner conduct a written survey of any major company that’s either moving out of state or laying off a large number of employees.
The legislation comes in the wake of Mercedes-Benz decision to vacate its Bergen County headquarters and take 1,000 jobs with it to the outskirts of Atlanta, citing the South’s lower cost of doing business.
New Jersey lost its richest resident late last year when billionaire David Tepper decamped to the tax friendly climes of Florida.
Tepper registered to vote in Florida last October, listing his residence as a Miami Beach condominium, and followed up in December by filing a court document declaring that he is now a resident of the state. He also carried out a business reorganization on Jan. 1 that relocated his Appaloosa Management from New Jersey to Florida, which is free of personal income and estate taxes.
The move could save Tepper hundreds of millions of dollars in state taxes several years from now. Florida has been pitching itself as a warm-weather tax haven to hedge fund managers in the Northeast, some of whom face a 2017 deadline to pay taxes on billions of dollars in performance fees that they had kept offshore for years. A Florida residence could offer partial relief to New York and New Jersey money managers who face the prospect of surrendering at least half of the deferred money to federal, state and local taxes.
“Anyone who has a large deferral coming due in 2017” is thinking about ways of reducing the tax hit, said Anthony Tuths, a tax attorney in the New York office of Withum who advises alternative investment funds. “What is easier than packing up your house in New York City and moving down to Miami?”
A poll released Monday shows New Jersey following national trends in residents’ gloomy assessment of their income and the larger economy. The study from Stockton University’s polling institute found that a majority of New Jersey residents feel their income has failed to keep up with increases in the cost of living. 55 percent of respondents described their income as “falling behind the cost of living,” while 37 percent said it was “just keeping pace.” JT Aregood, PolitickerNJ Read more
New Jersey faced $153.5 billion in outstanding debt obligations last July, hitting a new record, according to a report released by state officials Friday.
The cost of public employee benefits, school construction and transportation projects drove the 6.9 percent, or $9.9 billion, increase for fiscal 2015.
But not all of the increase was attributed to new debt.
Treasury Department officials said New Jersey transitioned to a new accounting methodology for pension and post-retirement health benefits last year. Those bookkeeping methods, which are more stringent than what the state used previously, were designed by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board.
Growth in unfunded pension liabilities, unfunded medical benefits for retirees, and the effect of switching to the new accounting standards contributed an $8.5 billion increase in the state’s non-bonded debt.
On the other hand, New Jersey’s bonded debt rose $1.4 billion, or 3.35 percent, according to the report, led by a $755 million surge in borrowing for school construction projects and $609 million in added borrowing for the state’s troubled Transportation Trust Fund.
That fund’s borrowing authority runs out at the end of June, and Governor Christie and lawmakers have not said how it will be renewed – through more borrowing, an increase in New Jersey’s gas tax, or another method.
Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year.
An estimated 45.3 percent of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.)
Roughly half pay no federal income tax because they have no taxable income, and the other roughly half get enough tax breaks to erase their tax liability, explains Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.
Despite the fact that rich people paying little in the way of income taxes makes plenty of headlines, this is the exception to the rule: The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay a higher effective income tax rate than any other group (around 23 percent, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50 percent.
On average, those in the bottom 40 percent of the income spectrum end up getting money from the government. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent of Americans, by far, pay the most in income taxes, forking over nearly 87 percent of all the income tax collected by Uncle Sam.
The top 1 percent of Americans, who have an average income of more than $2.1 million, pay 43.6 percent of all the federal individual income tax in the US; the top 0.1 percent — just 115,000 households, whose average income is more than $9.4 million — pay more than 20 percent of it.
When it comes to all federal taxes — individual income, payroll, excise, corporate income and estate taxes — the distributions of who pays what is more spread out. This is partially because nearly everyone pays excise taxes, which include taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes.
