41.7% of American Tax Filers “Lucky Duckies” in 2009
There’s a new Statistics of Income Bulletin out, with preliminary numbers from the 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
42,500,000
32.6%
43,800,000
32.6%
45,700,000
33.0%
46,600,000
32.6%
51,600,000
36.3%
58,600,000
41.7%
You’re reading that right: 41.7 percent of all households who filed tax
returns last year owed no federal income tax at all for the entire
tax year. That doesn’t mean they didn’t owe
any extra on , but that
they didn’t owe any federal income tax at all on the income they
earned in . If you paid your income taxes you
should feel like a chump.
Around the middle of April as the federal income tax filing deadline
approaches, tax resistance articles hit the media frequently. Here are some
examples from past years:
A post-tax-day wrap-up quotes war tax resister Ed Hedemann, and also Jack O’Malley, one of three Catholic priests in Pittsburgh who were refusing to pay war taxes.
A news report on tax day protests includes a mention of “Seven Pittsburgh priests [who] will refuse to pay about a third of their federal income taxes in a protest against the nuclear arms race” and of war tax resister Ralph Dull, who “drove a truck filled with 325 bushels of corn to the IRS office in Dayton” in lieu of cash payment.
