This USA Today article says that 47% of people payed no Federal Taxes. I think the more interesting number is that 40% make a profit on the federal income tax.
About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.
Also, the irs.gov site has tons of data with various breakdowns.
Well, if the other country has income taxes. For example, in the British Virgin Islands the income tax rate is zero.
I don't get why more Americans aren't enraged about the United States' treatment of emigrants. For citizens of most other countries, if you don't live there and you don't make money there, you don't pay taxes there.
Why would Americans be enraged about that? The U.S. has a long history of distrusting people who leave the country. Sticking it to emigrants (i.e. people who "abandoned the USA") would be popular among both the left and right, and among many social classes. Emigrants aren't very well liked among populists in either the Republican or Democratic parties, sometimes even seen as approaching a mild form of treason, whether they left for draft-dodging reasons (Candada during Vietnam), tax-dodging reasons (BVI & co.), or political reasons (communists who emigrated to Russia). People don't mean "love it or leave it" in the sense that both are legitimate choices!
I say this as someone about to start a job in Europe myself; it's somewhat of a sore point with many people ("America not good enough for you?"). The current economy being bad is really the only thing that makes it relatively easy to smooth over, because I can fall back on, "well nobody in the U.S. was hiring in my area and this opportunity in Europe came up", and people sorta understand because everyone's willing to believe that the U.S. job market is bad right now.
Mostly I can't think of the constituency that would support lowering taxes on emigrants. Republicans are usually the enthusiastic tax-cutters, but emigrants are even less popular among Republicans than among Democrats, partly due to heartland-patriotism type of culture, and partly because the expat vote is skewed Democratic.
