President’s Private Sector Survey On Cost Control -1984

President’s Private Sector Survey On Cost Control
A Report to The President (Reagan)

January 15, 1984. Available from the Congressional Research Service. The excerpt below can be found on page 12.   

• “Importantly, any meaningful increases in taxes from personal income would have to come from lower and middle-income families, as 90% of all personal taxable income is generated below the taxable income level of $35,000.
• Further, there isn’t much more that can be extracted from high income brackets. If the Government took 100% of all taxable income beyond the $75,000 tax bracket not already taxed,
  it would get only $17 billion, and this confiscation, which would destroy productive enterprise, would only be sufficient to run the Government for several days.
• Resistance to additional income taxes would be even more widespread if people were aware that:
• With two-thirds of everyone’s personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100% of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Government contributions to transfer payments.
• In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their government.”