Paying for the jobs bill.

[Ted King]

DaveS wrote:
[quote=Ted King]
[quote=DaveS]
[quote=Ted King]
[quote=cbelt3]

Now look at the (factual) numbers. Math has a funny way of being non-political. Yep. Makes sense.

First, just a note: I think the correct link to the quote is this:

http://www.boortz.com/weblogs/nealz-nuze...ear-ruler/

The assumptions that are made about what numbers to crank through the math don't matter? How about this assumption from the OP: "Let’s assume that all of these households earn pretty much around the $1 million mark (because let’s face it, there are a lot more people earning close to a million than close to a billion)." Nothing iffy about that, huh?

Also, the author pretends that the intent is to pay for the whole jobs bill with one year's increase in taxes on those making a million or more, but the taxes are intended to run for 10 years.
Yes your right... so let's double the numbers... instead of 50K let's make it 100k.
I have no idea what you are talking about.
From the original numbers .. which as you note are to some degree factual, assumed AND estimates... "With a 5% surtax on $1 million, that comes out to $50,000 for every household".

So I used the 50k and doubled it to come up with the 100K "corrected" amount per taxpayer to be collected.
Okay then, but notice how the author rounded: "13,996,050,000… so about $13 billion". Yeah, right. It doesn't matter, though, since the author didn't have many of the other numbers right either. As voodoopenguin pointed out, the proposed rate is 5.6%, not 5% (another example of the author's unusual notion of how and when to round?). Also, according to the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation the actual number of people earning $1 million or more is 330,000 - not the approx. 280,000 that the author states. Using the author's method of calculating (which isn't right for another reason that I'm curious to see if you catch) with these correct numbers - but still assuming the $1 million apiece income number - we get:

330,000 times $1,000,000 = $330,000,000,000 (total taxable income if everyone making a million dollars or over made just a million dollars).

$330,000,000 times 5.6% (0.056) = $18,480,000,000 (approx. $18.5 billion) per year.

$18.5 billion times ten years = $185 billion. That's well short of the $445 billion the jobs bill will cost, but it's 20 times more than the author implied in his article.

That is with the assumption that everyone who makes $1 million dollars or more are only making only exactly $1 million. If we do as you suggest and double that we get:

$185 billion times 2 (from your hypothetical to take care of the issue of people making more than $1 million a year) = $370 billion. Now that's getting right up there much closer to the $445 billion cost of the jobs bill.

When you tried to deal with the "making more than $1 million dollar issue, you just sort of pulled the "2" out of the air, much like the author pulled the "Let’s assume that all of these households earn pretty much around the $1 million mark (because let’s face it, there are a lot more people earning close to a million than close to a billion)" out of the air, too. How's about you get back with some numbers from a reliable source rather than pulling numbers out of the air in an effort to show that Ried and the Democrats in the Senate are wrong in their numbers.

That article is really a sloppy mess.