The new SOI Tax Stats report on individual income tax data is out. It covers individual income tax returns through 2005.

The first thing I looked for was “how many people who file taxes actually owed any federal income tax at all for 2005?” In 2006, Americans filed 134,372,678 income tax returns. Of those, 90,593,081 (67.42%) were “taxable returns” — meaning those returns on which there was a “total income tax” for the year.

That is to say that 32.58% of those households who filed their 2005 tax returns owed no federal income tax at all in 2005. To clarify: this does not mean that they didn’t owe any extra when they filed their returns, but that they did not owe any federal income tax at all throughout the year. If any had been withheld from their wages, they got every dime back as a refund.

If you’re in the two-thirds who are funding Dubya’s adventures with your paycheck, consider joining the other third who aren’t.

(I’ve written about the Lucky Duckies who don’t pay federal income tax before. See for instance 18 October 2005.)

The Center for American Progress has published a delicious timeline of the many pundits and politicians who have announced that “the coming months are crucial” in the ongoing effort to screw over Iraq.

The Bush administration as well as supporters and some critics of the Bush Iraq strategy have told Americans time and again during the past four years that the “next few months” in Iraq will be the “decisive, critical period” of the war — the one in which Iraq’s warring factions will compromise to share power; in which the bloody civil war among sectarian groups will ease into peace; and in which Iraq’s brutal violence will decline.

The implication has always been that U.S. military forces just need to hold on a little while longer for things to get better. They’ve been holding on a little while longer for more than four years — longer than it took the United States to win World War Ⅱ.

I’d like to see another timeline of all the times we’ve been told that withdrawal (or at least reduction) of troops is imminent — especially now that “US troop levels in Iraq have hit their highest point of the more than four year old war.”

Thanks to Rosemarie Jackowski at Media with Conscience for giving me a thumbs-up in the course of her piece on honor and remote controlled warfare.