美国财政刺激有多猛？1亿多家庭去年“零纳税”
By 新浪财经
8/20/2021
一项最新调查显示，美国超过1亿个家庭，相当于所有纳税人的61%，在2020年缴纳的联邦所得税为零。
新冠病毒大流行和联邦刺激政策导致不欠联邦所得税或从政府获得税收抵免的美国人数量激增。
根据美国城市-布鲁金斯税收政策中心（Urban-Brookings tax Policy Center）的这份报告，2020年1.07亿个家庭不欠个人所得税，而2019年为7600万，占所有纳税人的44%。
城市-布鲁金斯税收政策中心的高级研究员霍华德-格莱科曼（Howard Gleckman）表示：“这真的是一个很大的数字，但也真的是暂时的。”
他说，零纳税家庭激增的主要原因——高失业率、大规模的经济刺激支票和慷慨的税收抵免计划——将在2022年之后基本消失，因此从明年开始，零纳税家庭的比例将再次下降。
至于今年，美国零所得税家庭的比例预计将保持在高水平，在57%左右。这一数字明年预计将降至42%，到2025年保持在41%或42%左右，前提是“假设经济继续反弹，几项临时税收优惠如期到期。”
根据税收政策中心的数据，2020年，最富有的20%纳税人缴纳了78%的联邦所得税，高于2019年的68%；最富有的1%纳税人缴纳了28%的税收，高于2019年的25%。
2021年，美国国会增加了儿童税收抵免、劳动所得税抵免、儿童和受抚养人的税收抵免，所有这些都抹去了数百万美国家庭欠下的联邦税收。
税收政策中心表示，由于减免和税收变动，年收入低于2.8万美元的家庭今年不会缴纳任何联邦税。在中等收入家庭中，约43%的家庭不缴纳联邦所得税。
值得注意的是，美国的联邦所得税不包括工资税。税收政策中心估计，去年只有20%的家庭既不缴纳联邦所得税，也不缴纳工资税。此外，“几乎所有人”都要缴纳一些其他形式的税，包括州和地方的销售税、消费税、财产税和州所得税。
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61% of Americans paid no federal income taxes in 2020, Tax Policy Center says
By Robert Frank
8/20/2021
KEY POINTS
- More than 100 million U.S. households, or 61% of all taxpayers, paid no federal income taxes last year, according to a report from the Tax Policy Center.
- The pandemic and federal stimulus led to a huge spike in the number of Americans who either owed no federal income tax or received tax credits from the government.
- The main reasons for the spike — high unemployment, large stimulus checks and generous tax credit programs — will largely expire after 2022.
More than 100 million U.S. households, or 61% of all taxpayers, paid no federal income taxes last year, according to a new report.
The pandemic and federal stimulus led to a huge spike in the number of Americans who either owed no federal income tax or received tax credits from the government. According to the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, 107 million households owed no income taxes in 2020, up from 76 million — or 44% of all taxpayers — in 2019.
“It’s a really big number,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow in the Tax Policy Center. “It’s also really transitory.”
Gleckman said the main reasons for the spike — high unemployment, large stimulus checks and generous tax credit programs — will largely expire after 2022, so the share of nontaxpayers will fall again starting next year.
The share of Americans who pay zero income taxes is expected to stay high, at around 57% this year, according to the Tax Policy Center. It’s expected to fall back down to 42% in 2022 and remain at around 41% or 42% through 2025, “assuming the economy continues to rebound and several temporary tax benefits expire as scheduled,” Gleckman said.
Despite being fleeting, the high number of nontaxpayers is sure to fuel the debate in Congress over higher taxes on the wealthy. Many Democrats say the wealthy don’t pay their fair share, and cite a series of recent articles in ProPublica showing that billionaires including Jeff Bezos and Carl Icahn paid no federal income taxes in certain years. The $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill in Congress is expected to include increases in capital gains taxes, a higher top rate on ordinary income, a higher corporate tax rate and other measures aimed at those making $400,000 or more.
Some Republicans argue that the tax structure is already progressive and relies heavily on revenue from a small group of high earners and companies at the top, while many Americans pay little or no taxes. The share of Americans who pay no federal income taxes has been hovering around 44% for most of the last decade, according to the Tax Policy Center.
The top 20% of taxpayers paid 78% of federal income taxes in 2020, according to the Tax Policy Center, up from 68% in 2019. The top 1% of taxpayers paid 28% of taxes in 2020, up from 25% in 2019.
For 2021, Congress increased the size of the child tax credit, the earned income tax credit, and the child and the dependent care tax credit — all of which erased the federal taxes owed for millions of American families.
No household making less than $28,000 will pay any federal taxes this year due to the credits and tax changes, according to the Tax Policy Center. Among middle-income households, about 43% will pay no federal income tax.
The offsets to income taxes last year were small for many families, in dollar terms, Gleckman said.
“Imagine somebody who would have owed $1,500 in 2020 income tax until they got two stimulus payments — $1,200 in April and $600 in December,” he said. “That threw them into the category of nonpayers. While the payments resulted in a large percentage increase in their after-tax income, the dollar amount of their tax cut was only a tiny fraction of a high-income filer who received a tax cut of, say, $30,000 from the 2017 [Tax Cuts and Jobs Act], yet still owed some tax.”
Federal income taxes do not include payroll taxes. The Tax Policy Center estimates that only 20% of households paid neither federal income taxes nor payroll taxes. And “nearly everyone” paid some other form of taxes, including state and local sales taxes, excise taxes, property taxes and state income taxes, according to the report.
绝望的美国人：他们失了业，还收到付不起的税单
3/02/2021
现在正值美国报税季，当艾丽卡·罗斯（Erika Rose）坐下来缴税时，突然发现自己欠了联邦政府600美元，她惊呆了。从去年4月份开始，罗斯就失业了，整个冬天，她的每一分钱都用来支付房租和电费。在最近一次去杂货店的时候，她的银行账户里只有20美元。那么，突如其来的欠税，到底是怎么回事呢？
失业者多出一笔账单
31岁的罗斯现在住在洛杉矶。她无奈地说：“我很难过。我要怎么付超过600美元的税单? 在我以前的生活中，我从来没有这么担心过我将如何支付账单。”
罗斯是数百万美国失业工人中的一员，他们都面临着出乎意料的一个税单，税单从几百美元到几千美元不等。很多人说他们根本付不起。从税收的角度来看，每周的失业补助也算作收入，就像工作收到的工资一样。但是很少有人意识到他们从政府得到的钱实际上是要纳税的。根据智库世纪基金会（Century Foundation）的数据，2020年，在4000万失业工人中，只有不到40%的人在领取失业救济金时，预先缴纳了收入税。
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对于那些已经失业将近一年的人来说，再花一笔钱来支付他们的税单，将令生活雪上加霜，本来就靠救助金生活，如今又要多出另一个经济负担。穷人权益的提倡者和一些民主党议员正试图免除这些接收救济者的收入税。
乔治敦大学法学教授布莱恩·加勒（Brian Galle）表示：“我认为我们不应该对失业保险福利征税，而且我们真的不应该在经济严重衰退期间对其征税。正确的做法是将去年的失业保险福利的征税额降为零。”
在失业人群中，人们呼吁国会取消对失业期间的收入征税，但这个想法没有被纳入最新的1.9万亿美元法案中。
关于失业者的收入是否要征税的讨论
失业保险福利创立于1935年的大萧条时期，作为帮助失业者生存的保障。几十年来，它都没有被征税，但在上世纪70年代末和80年代初，人们推动对各种形式的收入征税。到1986年，所有的失业津贴都要缴纳联邦所得税。人们认为，如果不对失业援助征税，那么可能会阻碍人们寻找需要对工资征税的工作。
曾在20世纪70年代和80年代在国会致力于税收改革的皮特·戴维斯说：“基本理论是每个人都应该对收入纳税，仅仅因为他们失业了并不会改变这一点。”
美国各州对失业救济金的征税方式各不相同。9个州没有所得税，所以他们对失业救济不征税。另外6个州——阿拉巴马州、加利福尼亚州、蒙大拿州、新泽西州、宾夕法尼亚州和弗吉尼亚州，选择不对失业人员征收州一级的税。在疫情期间，马里兰州和特拉华州决定暂时不对失业期间的收入征税。
复杂的税收计算系统 让他们仍然欠了一大笔税
一些人认为，失业者本应该提前为他们的税单存钱。当人们填写失业援助申请表时，有一个方框他们可以勾选来扣缴税款，就像大多数人在工作中拿薪水时所做的那样。
但一些失业的美国人表示，尽管他们打了勾，但最终还是背负了巨额税单。罗斯就是其中之一。去年4月，当她失去了在一份处理借记卡和信用卡交易的工作时，她在预扣税款的方框上打勾，但她最终还是欠了联邦政府的税。
塔林·约翰斯顿也是如此。当疫情恶化时，她从一家整形外科诊所的医疗美容师岗位上被解雇，此后她每周都被从失业支票中扣去最多的税。当她最近坐下来填写2020年联邦和州税收表格时，她还是欠了1500美元。
“整个情况都太疯狂了。”41岁的约翰斯顿说，她住在布鲁克林。“我的积蓄没了。我的401(k)大部分也没了。我有6000美元的信用卡债务和拖欠的房租，现在我还欠着政府1500美元的税。”约翰斯顿说，她正在努力攒钱，以便在4月15日的最后期限之前支付税款。她工作的整形诊所开始给她安排更多的工作，但她现在的收入只有疫情前的一半。她最大的希望是国会通过1400美元的经济刺激方案，这样她就可以用来交去年的税。
约翰斯顿说：“当我得到这张即将到来的刺激支票时，它将最终进入我的税单中。”
解决方法：免税还是延长缴纳？
在国会的众多解决方案中，参议员理查德·德宾（Richard J. Durbin，D-Ill.)和众议员辛迪（Cindy Axne，D-Iowa）已经提出了单独立法，提议在2020年失业期间，10200美元以内的收入不用交税。这一提议与国会在经济大衰退期间的做法类似，当时失业期间的部分收入未被征税。不过，到目前为止，这项单独立法还没有进展。
这项法案的反对者认为，一旦免除对10200美元征税，那么估计会损失大约300亿美元。反对者认为，可以延长失业者纳税的截止日期，这样失业者也不用那么着急交税，而政府还可以拿这笔钱继续帮助那些深陷困境的人。但批评人士表示，现在就降低2020年失业援助的税收，可以帮助很多已经重返工作岗位的人度过难关。
无论是免除对失业者的收入征税，还是延迟征税，国会对税收做出改革，以帮助人们减缓经济压力的时间不多了。
经济政策圈讨论的另一个选项是，由法学教授加勒（Galle）和伊丽莎白·潘科蒂（Elizabeth Pancotti）倡导直接免除2020年大部分失业补贴的税收。加勒和潘科蒂认为，财政部以前在自然灾害期间就这么做过，而疫情是一场大规模灾难。然而，两名因未获授权公开发言而要求匿名的财政部高级官员表示，这个想法不在讨论范围之内。
税收政策中心的研究员伊莱恩·马格说，在这一点上，一个更实际的解决办法可能是：美国国税局给予去年失业的人更多的时间来支付他们的税款。马格说道：“我很同情那些要缴一大笔税的人。我认为他们应该得到一个慷慨的延迟付款计划，在好几个月后或者在他们恢复工作之前，最好不要有非常急迫的税单。”
马格说，从长远来看，理想的解决方案是让失业者填写预扣税表，就像大多数人开始新工作时上交给雇主的那样。大多数州都只预扣10%的失业联邦税，但这并没有考虑到许多人税收情况的复杂性。这也就是为什么很多人欠的税更多了，即使他们确实勾选了预先支付税款的选项。
支持减免失业税的人指出，这次疫情是美国现代史上最不平等的一次，导致低薪工人大量死亡。这些美国人最不可能有储蓄，也最不可能应付突如其来的账单。根据一个世纪基金会对美国人口普查数据的分析，在去年3月至11月失业的成年人中，有近一半的家庭收入低于5万美元。
他们还指出，疫情导致社会的很多方面都出现了混乱，去年春天申请失业的人如潮水般涌来，许多州的办公室人满为患，无法给人们提供缴税指导。以凯特·夏恩在布鲁克林的遭遇为例。纽约州告诉她，她的失业记录在该州的计算机系统中存在问题，所以她只能每周打电话申请失业救济。34岁的夏恩就这么做了，但她说，电话系统上没有代扣税款的选项。
现在，夏恩欠了几千美元的税款，这是一笔巨大的账单，她一直在为如何支付而苦苦挣扎，因为她还没有找到另一份工作。夏恩说：“我们很多人都感到惊讶，因为我们欠了数千美元，这糟透了，考虑到这场疫情中发生的一切，这让人感觉太不公平了。”
VOICE
America’s History of Luck Is Running Out
The country’s rise was fueled by fortunate circumstances that seem unlikely to last much longer.
BY STEPHEN M. WALT | DECEMBER 23, 2020
The United States is the luckiest country in modern history. It began as a set of marginal European outposts, separated from the settlers’ home countries by a difficult sea voyage. When the colonies gained independence, they were weak, poor, and fractious. But in less than a century and a half, those 13 original colonies had expanded across North America, survived a civil war, driven other great powers from the Western Hemisphere, and created the world’s largest and most dynamic economy. That ascent didn’t stop until the end of the 20th century, when victory in the Cold War left the United States alone at the pinnacle of power. For a little while.
Americans like to attribute this remarkable story to their ancestors’ virtues, the enlightened wisdom of the Founding Fathers, and the intrinsic merits of America’s peculiar blend of liberal democratic capitalism. But in addition to the considerable cruelty displayed toward the native population and the slaves imported from Africa, good fortune played a major role as well.
Americans were fortunate that North America was rich with natural resources and fertile land, traversed by navigable rivers, and had a mostly temperate climate. And from the very beginning, the United States benefited from rivalries among the existing great powers. France backed the American Revolution in order to weaken its British rival, and the new nation doubled its territory when Napoleon needed money to wage war in Europe and was willing to sell the Louisiana Purchase at a bargain price. War in Europe also helped the United States survive its foolish decision to invade Canada in the War of 1812; Britain was too busy defeating Napoleon to turn its full strength against its obnoxious former colonists. The United States gradually attracted more attention as it expanded across the continent and took Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California from Mexico, but the European powers spent most of the time competing with each other and for the most part left the United States alone. By 1900, British concerns about a rising Germany led them to abandon their territorial claims in the Pacific Northwest and South America and appease the United States. And at that moment, the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 became a reality.
Indeed, no other great power has enjoyed the so-called free security that America has possessed since its founding. Apart from Britain, every other major power has been invaded at least once in the past 200 years, and several of them have been conquered and at least temporarily occupied. Even Britain lost some 50,000 civilians to German bombings during World War II. Foreign troops last occupied U.S. soil during the War of 1812, and the continental United States was effectively unscathed during the two world wars that decimated Europe and Asia during the 20th century. That free security also permitted the United States to be the last major power to enter both wars, to suffer the fewest losses, and to emerge in a dominant position when the fighting stopped.
To be sure, U.S. leaders also made some smart decisions that took advantage of these lucky breaks. They adopted a constitution that privileged individual freedom and spurred the creation of a boisterous capitalist economy. They opened the continent to immigrants from all over the world and managed to contain the frictions that waves of immigrants occasioned. And while the shameful legacy of slavery continues to blight the American experience, the North’s victory in the Civil War prevented a permanent division of the continent and allowed the reunited country to reach its full power potential.
Since becoming a great power, the United States has also been fortunate in its choice of enemies. Imperial Germany was a daunting military power, but its armed forces had been depleted by the time the American Expeditionary Force arrived in 1918. The Nazi Wehrmacht was even more capable, but Adolf Hitler was an incompetent strategist, and the Soviet Union did most of the work to defeat Germany anyway. Imperial Japan’s economy was roughly a fifth the size of America’s in 1941, its wartime leadership was deeply divided, and it already had thousands of troops bogged down fighting in China. World War II in the Pacific was hardly a cakewalk, but the outcome was not in doubt once the United States mobilized for war.
The Soviet Union was by far America’s most formidable adversary, but the deck was still heavily stacked in America’s favor. The Soviet economy was significantly smaller, its allies were much weaker and less reliable, and it faced serious rivals on several frontiers while America sat unthreatened in the Western Hemisphere. The Soviet command economy was a wonderland of waste and inefficiency, and Soviet leaders had to devote a much higher percentage of GDP to defense just to keep the United States in sight. Mikhail Gorbachev’s belated efforts to reform the system failed, and the Soviet Union collapsed not with a bang but with a whimper.
The result was a brief unipolar moment when the United States faced no serious rivals and both politicians and pundits convinced themselves that America had found the magic formula for success in an increasingly globalized world. The hubris of the 1990s was to be expected, perhaps: No other country could claim such a long and mostly unbroken run of success, where ill fortune never seemed to hold the country back for long.
Is this still the case today? Can Americans continue to assume that the world is their oyster and that things will always turn out right no matter how irresponsibly they seem to behave?
Maybe, but maybe not. Here are four reasons why the United States’ luck just might be running out.
First of all, the free security that the nation has known since its founding is not quite as profound as it used to be. Don’t get me wrong: Having no serious enemies nearby is still a considerable benefit, and those two vast oceanic moats still protect the United States from a fair number of potential problems. The Pentagon is formally the “Defense Department,” but America’s armed forces don’t spend much time or money defending U.S. soil directly. Instead, they go into harm’s way in order to try to shape political conditions in a host of faraway places. Why can they do that? Because Americans don’t have to worry about an invasion from Canada or Mexico—or anybody else.
Unfortunately, 2020 has given us a grim reminder that the protection the United States once enjoyed is not as ironclad as it once was. Case in point: In less than a year, the coronavirus has killed more Americans than World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined. As I write this, the daily death toll in the United States is larger than the number of Americans killed on 9/11. Distance still matters, but it does not protect against every danger.
We also learned last week that a foreign power (generally believed to be Russia) has hacked into a vast array of government computer systems, including many that are part of the U.S. national security establishment. The full extent of the damage is still unknown, but the incident illustrates another vulnerability that distance cannot diminish. The United States is still fortunate to be located where it is, but that advantage is not as great as it once was.
The second cause for concern is China, which is a far more formidable rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Americans may have racked up a long winning streak from 1776 to the mid-1990s, but China boasts a much better record since then. China’s economy will soon be substantially larger than that of the United States, it has stayed out of ruinous wars, its ruling elites believe they are destined to be a (if not the) leading power in this century, their model of single-party state capitalism has generally worked well, and they are fully engaged in key international institutions and in every region in the world. While the Trump administration has been busy flirting with various forms of protectionism, China has been negotiating and signing new trade and investment deals. Beijing’s mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak allowed it to spread abroad, but its subsequent response (and the cooperation of the population) has kept its own death toll below a reported 5,000 lives (in a country of 1.4 billion people). As a result, the Chinese economy is back open for business. The United States had more time to prepare for the pandemic, but the number of dead is well over 300,000, and the U.S. economy is still devastated by lockdowns and other pandemic-related restrictions.
The challenge China poses could be overstated. China’s per capita income is still significantly lower than America’s, and its new power surplus (i.e., the amount of wealth that can be mobilized to shape events elsewhere once domestic needs are met) is smaller. Its splashy Belt and Road Initiative hasn’t gone nearly as well as Xi Jinping hoped, and its recent embrace of belligerent “wolf warrior” diplomacy and its heavy-handed approach toward dissidents, trading partners, and its Uighur minority have sparked growing concerns about China’s long-term intentions. Even so, only an incurable optimist would assume that China will fall by the wayside as readily as America’s earlier rivals did.
A third reason to wonder about the United States’ continued good fortune is the series of wounds Americans decided to inflict on themselves. The list is long: the ; the deliberately manufactured polarization and the resulting gridlock that makes timely action on vital issues difficult to impossible; the fetishizing of “liberty” to the point that millions of Americans think refusing to wear a mask in the middle of a pandemic is not stupid but heroic; the enduring public prominence of a phalanx of liars, charlatans, and trolls who have built lucrative careers spewing a toxic blend of falsehoods and hatred; the pervasive influence of well-funded lobbying organizations whose commitment to truth is paper-thin; the distorting impact of money in U.S. politics and a ramshackle electoral system that increasingly enshrines minority rule; and a foreign-policy elite that is largely free from accountability and seems incapable of learning from past mistakes. I could go on, but you get the idea.
And then there’s climate change. The atmosphere doesn’t care what you or I happen to think about this problem; it’s going to follow the laws of physics and chemistry no matter what we choose to believe. Humans are free to deny the reality of climate change, but the planet isn’t paying attention. Favorable geopolitics won’t rescue the United States if the atmosphere keeps heating up (though some other countries will face even greater hardships), and having big-deck aircraft carriers, sophisticated ballistic missiles, state-of-the-art anti-submarine warfare or cyberwarfare capabilities, and the other trappings of a modern great power won’t help on this front either. A large economy, well-trained scientists and engineers, and an innovative private sector may help the country mitigate, adapt, and adjust in various ways, but the challenges they will have to address grow ever more daunting each year. When you marry what is happening to the planet to the political dysfunctions discussed above, it’s easy to imagine how the United States’ long run of good fortune could come to a sad end in a generation or two.
Am I being too gloomy? I hope so. The United States retains many strengths—especially in science and technology—and its potential rivals face serious problems of their own. A return to the unchecked primacy of the 1990s is not in the cards, but intelligent reforms could go a long way to preserving the security and prosperity of the country along with its core political values. The imminent departure of the Worst President Ever will surely help.
Branch Rickey famously remarked that “luck is the residue of design.” Americans should no longer assume that success is simply their birthright or that Otto von Bismarck was right when he reportedly quipped that there is “special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” If Americans want to enjoy a future as favorable as their past, it will take a willingness to work together that has gone missing for a couple of decades. If they can’t bring it back, the United States’ long run of luck is likely to come to an end.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/23/americas-history-of-luck-is-running-out/
