(My apologies that this is a day late, but better late than never, right?)

As our American readers will know, today, April 15, is Tax Day in the United States. It's the day every year by which the American Taxpayer has to settle his yearly tax bill with the IRS. Naturally, all week, the media and various blogs have been talking about this day. Political Bingo will be no exception! Specifically, we're going to discuss the concept of fair share and fairness. This is a controversial topic, certainly, and it's worth discussing.

For the record, Tax evasion is a felony, and I think it's safe to say that avoiding your legal obligation by breaking the law is not paying your fair share regardless of whether you're John and Jane Millionaire or John and Jane Q. Public. I'm not going to focus on tax evaders because they're not relevant to the discussion.

Now, with that said, we've all heard the old saw about the rich not paying their fair share. I love that line because it makes for a great soundbite but doesn't hold up to even the most cursory of inspections.

For example, according to this report from The Tax Foundation, in 2008, "more than a third of all tax returns resulted in complete nonpayment." They go on to define "nonpayment" as those who "got back every dollar that was withheld from their paychecks during the year". Additionally, it seems that a number of people "got back quite a bit more, turning Tax Day into a payday". In that same year, families with two children that earned $55,583 or less (including the effects of the stimulus checks) had effectively paid no income tax. That encompasses 36.3% of all tax returns -- over one third, and that was as of 2008. Hold that thought.

Let's re-examine the "payday" line above. According to this posting by the Tax Foundation, 25 million tax filers received $51.6 billion in EITC, $50.5 billion of which was in excess of their income tax liability. In other words, 97.8% of the money paid out because of EITC was profit rather than a return of the taxpayer's income tax payments. When we look at child tax credit benefits, we see that $30.7 billion in refunds were issued under this tax credit, $20.5 billion of which was in excess of their tax payments for the year (again, "profit"). That $20.5 billion represents 71% of the tax returns that the child tax credit applied to. Again, this doesn't really sound like "fair share" to me.

Here's an interesting take on the situation, courtesy of this article by David Leonhardt in the New York Times (and by "interesting", I mean "wrong but predictable"). According to Mr. Leonhardt and the NYT, 47% of households owe no taxes for 2009, up from 38% in 2007. Leonhardt then goes to torturous lengths to try to explain why this number derives from a "cleverly selective reading", only later to concede that it's actually correct. I can only imagine that the reading is "cleverly selective" because it's careful to cleverly select only the truth. No matter, we'll dig a little further into the article. Leonhardt suggests that:

With Tax Day coming on Thursday, 47 percent has become shorthand for the notion that the wealthy face a much higher tax burden than they once did while growing numbers of Americans are effectively on the dole.Neither one of those ideas is true.

I'm a little curious about this. If one not only doesn't pay any income tax, and, as noted above in the Tax Foundation articles, may actually get back more than they paid, how is this not being "on the dole", as Leonhardt puts it? If one has to expend such torturous effort to make a duck sound like anything other than a duck, one has to wonder if calling it a duck is correct but a point of "inconvenient truth".

Let's face it: The middle class doesn't pay its "fair share". The bottom 47% of America is either paying nothing in terms of income tax or is actually getting paid for the privilege of being an American. My math may be a little fuzzy here, but that would suggest to me that the remaining 53% is paying more than its "fair share".