Colorado Tax Data Raises Questions About Calls For Higher Taxes On Wealthy

By Cory Gaines | Commentary, Colorado Accountability Project

Colorado’s “rich” are already paying a lot (A LOT)

Tax Day, both the day when tax returns are due and the day at which you have worked enough to pay your taxes (and start working for yourself) recently passed.

Around that date I saw something online giving a breakdown of Federal tax receipts vs. income group and it got me thinking about Colorado’s tax receipts vs. income.

After doing some digging I have some data to share, and, as the top line here suggests, the “rich” in Colorado are already paying quite a bit. Certainly a giant percent of state revenue compared to how many filers there are.

As I’ll show below, if you look at the percentage of total tax receipts vs. the percentage of taxpayers (broken down by $10K income brackets) you find that It isn’t until you hit about $100K of adjusted Colorado taxable income that the percentages match. You also find quite a few disparities in age vs. share of income taxes.

This stands in direct contradiction to the notion that the rich aren’t paying their share. They are. They’re paying more–something that stands in stark relief when you see that I excluded the bottom income tiers entirely; i.e. I left out the parts of the income distribution that either have negative income or owe negative taxes due to low incomes.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE AT COLORADO ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT

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