40.1% of American Tax Filers “Lucky Duckies” in 2010 • TPL

There’s a new Statistics of Income Bulletin out, with preliminary numbers from the 2010 filing season showing the number and percentage of “lucky duckies” who file tax returns showing that they owed no federal income tax all year:

Tax Year	Number of Zero-Tax Filers	Zero-Tax Filers as a Percent of All Filers
2006	45,700,000	33.0%
2007	46,600,000	32.6%
2008	51,600,000	36.3%
2009	58,600,000	41.7%
2010	58,400,000	40.1%

You’re reading that right: 40.1 percent of all households who filed tax returns last year owed no federal income tax at all for the entire 2010 tax year. That doesn’t mean they didn’t owe any extra on April 17, but that they didn’t owe any federal income tax at all on the income they earned in 2010. If you paid your income taxes you should feel like a chump.

In other news:

In 2006, Congress decided to try to encourage people to inform on their employers and anyone else they knew of who was engaging in tax evasion — by offering informers a percentage of the take. How is that working out? “In the past five years, the IRS has given only one known whistleblower reward under the program.” This isn’t because nobody is trying to collect the rewards, but because the IRS is being stingy about paying them out.
One sign that the Greek adoption of tax resistance is widespread is this one: when the government hiked the costs of transit tickets by 40%, revenues only went up by 6%.
Here’s another note about the household tax resistance movement in Ireland.