The top 10 percent of Americans have experienced rapid income growth over the last 40 years, but the bottom 90 percent haven’t been so lucky. In fact, average income rose just $59 from 1966 to 2011 for the bottom 90 percent once those incomes were adjusted for inflation.

That’s according to a new study of tax data from David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his writing about tax policy. While the bottom 90 percent’s incomes rose just $59, the top 10 percent fared much better, he found:

In 2011 the average AGI of the vast majority fell to $30,437 per taxpayer, its lowest level since 1966 when measured in 2011 dollars. The vast majority averaged a mere $59 more in 2011 than in 1966. For the top 10 percent, by the same measures, average income rose by $116,071 to $254,864, an increase of 84 percent over 1966.

The difference in those gains has reduced the share of income the bottom 90 percent holds as well. That segment held two-thirds of all household income in 1966 but just 51.8 percent in 2011, Cay Johnston found. Other studies have had similar results. One study found that pay for chief executives increased 127 times faster than worker pay over the last 30 years, and official data has shown worker wages stagnating since the 1970s. That has led to a sharp increase in American income inequality, which now rivals rates from countries like the Ivory Coast and Pakistan.

The biggest driver in that disparity, Cay Johnston wrote, was not that the rich were working harder, “but the shift of income from labor to capital and changes in federal income, gift, and estate tax rules.” Indeed, the estate tax has been eased over recent decades and federal income taxes have become more favorable to the wealthy thanks to breaks for investment income. A recent study, in fact, found that the capital gains tax cut, which benefits the wealthy but does virtually nothing for everyone else, was “by far” the biggest driver in the growth of American income inequality. (HT: Huffington Post)

A slew of Republican governors have proposed massive tax cuts that they say will help generate job and economic growth in their states, with some pushing for the abolition of income taxes altogether. That is a misguided approach, though, according to an analysis of past tax cuts from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The five states that implemented deep tax cuts during the 1990s experienced slower job growth over the next economic cycle than states that did not, and none of those states experienced income growth that exceeded inflation, CBPP found:

Similarly, the five states that enacted the deepest tax cuts during the boom years of the middle and late 1990s saw job growth over the next full economic cycle (2000-2007) of less than 0.3 percent per year, on average, compared to 1.0 percent for the other states (see graph). They also had slower income growth than the rest of the nation on average.

CBPP’s report also noted that of eight major reports that studied the effects of state-level tax cuts on economic growth, six found that the cuts did not spur growth. Another found inconsistent results and only one supported the idea.

Still, Republicans in Kansas, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Nebraska are pushing massive tax cuts that largely benefit corporations and the wealthy under the banner of boosting economic growth. Those tax cuts will leave lower and middle class families with higher tax rates and fewer services on which they depend. What they won’t deliver, however, is a stronger state-level economy.

Sens. Roy Blunt (R-MO) and John Thune (R-SD) this afternoon offered an amendment to the Senate Democratic budget that they claim will protect the charitable tax deduction from elimination or restriction under the tax reform sought by Democrats. In reality, though, the amendment is a simple bait-and-switch attempt to reduce the budget’s overall revenue levels and would have no bearing on the charitable deduction.

The Democratic budget, authored by Washington Sen. Patty Murray (D), includes $975 billion in new revenues over the next decade to be gained through the closure of tax loopholes and elimination of tax expenditures that benefit the wealthy and corporations. The charitable deduction is among the most popular expenditures on both sides of the partisan spectrum, making it the perfect candidate for Blunt and Thune’s ploy.

The purpose statement at the top of the amendment reads:

To protect charitable organizations from being used as a source of revenue to pay for more spending by protecting the deduction for charitable giving from being capped, limited, or eliminated to pay for new spending as part of any tax increase.

Aside from that totally meaningless sentence that has no legislative significance, the amendment does not mention the charitable deduction. Instead, it simply cuts revenue levels for each year between 2014 and 2023. In total, the amendment would cut the amount the revenue originally sought by the Democratic budget roughly in half. It would have no impact on the charitable deduction, one way or the other, and would not in any way protect the tax break for charitable giving. The amendment, despite what Thune and Blunt would have people believe, is nothing more than a massive reduction in the budget’s revenue goals masked as protection of a popular tax deduction.

Atlanta’s city council overwhelmingly approved a plan that would, on its face, spend $200 million in public tax dollars to replace the Georgia Dome, the 20-year-old home of the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons. The dome, despite its seemingly young age, is among the older stadiums in the NFL thanks to a rash of publicly-financed construction across the league in recent years.

On first glance, the Atlanta deal seems like a pretty good one for taxpayers, at least relative to other stadium financing plans. The Falcons are going to cover $800 million of the $1 billion cost as well as some infrastructure improvements and cost overruns. But the $200 million cost to taxpayers is actually much larger, according to Neil DeMause at Field of Schemes, who tallied the public cost at more than $500 million once all the subsidies and costs are included:

Add the $300 million to our original $254 million, and we get a total public subsidy for the project of $554 million.

Could this be off? Sure: growth in hotel tax revenues could be less than what it has been; the financing costs for the stadium could eat up more of the money than I’ve estimated; or half a dozen other uncertainties. But as a best guess for how much the Falcons deal would cost the public, “more than half a billion dollars” is an excellent starting point.

While the Falcons have argued that the Georgia Dome’s age relative to other facilities is a hindrance, it hasn’t had any problem hosting major events lately. It will host the NCAA men’s Final Four in April, and it is the often the home of the Southeastern Conference men’s basketball tournament, college football classics and bowl games, and the NCAA Tournament. But it is falling behind in the race to host future Super Bowls (which aren’t as good for the economy as proponents often claim) and it doesn’t have enough luxury suites for owner Arthur Blank to maximize revenue, so the Falcons have spent the last year pushing for a replacement.

Today, they got it, even though Atlanta’s education budgets remain drained and such deals almost always turn out poorly for the taxpayers who foot the bill.

The latest House Republican budget would grant taxpayers with incomes above $1 million at least $200,000 in tax cuts even if the GOP closes tax loopholes to help pay for the plan, according to an analysis from Citizens for Tax Justice.

The GOP plan, authored by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), aims to reduce the top income tax rate to 25 percent and repeals many other taxes on the rich, including the Alternative Minimum Tax and increases included in Obamacare. Ryan wants to pay for the tax cut by closing loopholes and ending tax expenditures. The budget didn’t specify which loopholes and expenditures would be eliminated, but even if all of them that benefit the rich were done away with (except for preferences for capital gains and other investments, which Ryan has said he will keep), the budget would grant millionaires a tax cut in excess of $200,000. If it doesn’t eliminate loopholes, the tax cut would only grow larger, CTJ found:

In fact, under Ryan’s plan taxpayers with income exceeding $1 million in 2014 would receive an average net tax decrease of over $200,000 that year even if they had to give up all of their tax expenditures. These taxpayers would see an even larger net tax decrease if Congress failed to limit or eliminate enough tax expenditures to offset the costs of the proposed tax cuts.

Like former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Ryan insists that his plan will simultaneously grant a large tax cut to the wealthy, avoid tax increases on the lower- and middle-classes, and maintain the current level of revenue. The Tax Policy Center found during the election that those goals were impossible to maintain under Romney’s proposal and that to avoid adding to future deficits and debt, the plan would have to raise taxes on the middle class by an average of $2,000.

The current House GOP proposal provides an even bigger tax cut, making it even less likely that Ryan could raise sufficient revenues from the closure of tax loopholes to offset the estimated $5.7 trillion cost. To pay for the plan, then, the GOP would have no choice but to raise taxes on the middle class (by an average of $3,000) while granting a massive tax cut to millionaires. If it doesn’t, the Republican plan to reduce the debt will instead add trillions of dollars to it.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) introduced a plan today that would axe the state’s corporate and personal income taxes, replacing them instead with an increase in the sales tax. Jindal had promised the total elimination of income taxes during his State of the State address in January, and despite studies showing that it such a change would directly benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, he has followed through on the plan.

Jindal said his tax reform would be revenue neutral, and the sales tax would be increased to 5.88 percent. Louisianans would still pay their local sales taxes as well, meaning some residents would face double-digit sales tax rates after Jindal’s reform, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

The planned increase in the sales tax would raise the current rate by about 47 percent and would come on top of local sales taxes. Residents in New Orleans, for example, would pay a combined rate of about 11 percent under the plan.

Louisiana already has one of the highest combined average state and local sales tax rate in the country and the increase would put the state at the top of that list, according to information from The Tax Foundation.

The poorest Louisianans already pay more of their income in taxes than the richest, according to a study from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy that shows the bottom 20 percent of the state’s residents pay 10.6 percent of their income in taxes compared to just 4.6 percent for the top 1 percent of residents. Jindal’s plan would only skew the tax code further against the poor and middle class, since it would grant tax cuts to the rich while raising taxes on 80 percent of the state’s residents, according to ITEP.

Jindal said today that he would offset the increases some residents would face by providing rebates, but when ITEP conducted its preliminary study of his plan in January, it found that “any low income tax relief will likely be insufficient to offset the impact of the large sales tax hike necessary to make this tax swap revenue neutral.” Jindal isn’t the only Republican governor pushing such a plan. Republican governors in Nebraska and Kansas and the state legislature in North Carolina are also considering replacing income taxes with increased sales taxes.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) previewed the latest version of his budget, which he will formally unveil today, in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and the proposal closely mirrors both his past budgets and the plans he and Mitt Romney laid out during the 2012 presidential campaign. Like the Romney-Ryan 2012 plans, this version includes massive budget cuts to safety net programs and a major overhaul of the tax code that will largely benefit the wealthy and corporations.

As the 2012 budget did, the 2013 version reduces the number of income tax brackets from six to two, with marginal rates set at 10 percent and 25 percent. It is expected to stick to Ryan’s past tax proposals as well by repealing the Alternative Minimum Tax, cutting the top corporate tax rate to 25 percent, and converting the corporate tax code to an “international” system.

Estimates showed that past plans amounted to $3 trillion tax giveaways to the wealthy, but because of tax increases that took effect in 2013, Ryan’s newest tax cut is even larger. The federal government in all would lose a total of $7 trillion in revenue, according to Center for American Progress Tax and Budget Policy Director Michael Linden, the majority of which would go to the richest Americans and corporations. Reducing the corporate income tax to 25 percent would provide a tax break of more than $1 trillion; further tax changes would result in even bigger cuts. Trillions more would go to the wealthy.

Ryan again insists that those tax cuts won’t actually be realized, since any reform will be neutral thanks to the closure of tax loopholes. But he made similar claims in both 2011 and 2012, and in neither of those instances did he offer specific loopholes for closure, likely because doing so would have proven politically impractical.

Romney and Ryan also insisted that their proposal would cut taxes for every American (especially the wealthy) while not adding a dime to the federal deficit, but nonpartisan analysts found that upholding both of those standards was impossible. The Tax Policy Center found that Romney’s plan would have to make up $4.8 trillion through the closure of tax loopholes; failing that, he would have no choice but to add to the deficit or raise taxes by $2,000 on the average middle class family. Ryan’s version will have to make up even more revenue to avoid similar pitfalls.

Ryan has also stuck to the same spending principles of past budgets. He again turns Medicare into a voucher program and converts many social safety net programs to block grants modeled after the failed 1996 welfare reform law. Those plans would result in higher health care costs to seniors and major cuts to the social safety net, all while his plan gives a massive tax break to the richest Americans.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) will release the third edition of his budget Tuesday, and it will again make drastic changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and federal spending levels. It will also revamp the federal tax code through what Ryan touted as “pro-growth tax reform” during an appearance on Fox News Sunday this weekend. If his past budgets are any indication, such tax reform would dramatically lower tax rates on the wealthy and corporations, costing the government trillions of dollars in revenue.

The House budget, Ryan said, would achieve this “pro-growth tax reform” by lowering tax rates across the board while cutting tax expenditures, as CBS reports:

Ryan also repeated his call for “pro-growth tax reform” that lowers rates across the board by eliminating tax expenditures. “That’s good for economic growth,” he said, “That’s good for job creation and hard-working tax payers, by having less loopholes in the tax code.”

Ryan’s last budget, the Path to Prosperity, amounted to a $3 trillion tax cut for the rich and corporations. Ryan and House Republicans said they would make up for that lost revenue by closing tax loopholes, though they never took that step and it is unlikely there is enough politically-feasible revenue to be gained from doing so even if they tried. When Mitt Romney released a similar tax plan during the 2012 election, a nonpartisan analysis found that to avoid adding to the deficit, it would have to raise taxes on middle class families by an average of $2,000. Past plans included in House Republican budgets adhere to the same basic principles as the Romney tax plan and would almost surely require a similar tax increase.

Ryan promises his budget will balance in 10 years, a decade faster than the 2012 version. But he has only been able to claim balance because he assumes revenue will stay north of 18 percent of GDP, even though his tax plan would reduce it to roughly 15 percent of GDP, according to the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden. To achieve balance without raising sufficient revenue from closing loopholes — which, again, likely isn’t politically possible — Ryan would be forced to raise taxes on the middle class. To avoid raising taxes on the middle class, his plan to reduce America’s debt would instead add substantial amounts to it.