Taxes Paid by Nation's Two Top Jobs

A survey taken last April by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation revealed that 1 percent of Americans "love" to do their income taxes, while another 11 percent "like" to do them. Now, that doesn't say they love and like to PAY their taxes. They are either people who love to work with numbers, or are structured individuals, but probably more than not those who love/like doing their taxes are anticipating a refund and that's the motivation.

The same survey also revealed that 45 percent of us "dislike" doing our taxes and another 25 percent say they "hate" it. And with good reason, for the amount taxpayers pay their accountants or other services for tax preparation, increased from $112 billion in 1995 to $265 billion in 2005

Oh, and let's not forget that we will be working for Uncle Sam for another full week, until April 26th, this year's Tax Freedom Day. We'll work 116 days our of the 365 days we have in a year just to pay taxes. And in case you didn't know, for the average taxpayer, we work 106 days for food, clothing and housing. That's working 10 days less than we work to pay taxes.

Did you know that not all states have to pay income tax? They include:

Alaska
Florida
Nevada
New Hampshire
South Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Washington
Wyoming

And the following Countries have no personal income tax either:

Andorra
Bahamas
Bermuda
Bahrain
Brunei
Cayman Islands
Guernsey
Kuwait
Monaco
Oman
Qatar
Somalia
UAE
Vanuatu

Rush Limbaugh has on his site statistics on who pays the most income taxes, and the winner is: the top 50% of wage earners in the country pay 96.03% of the nation's income tax.

This includes President Geroge W. Bush and VP Dick Chaney. The President earned his presidential salary of $400,000 and had some investment income. He and the First Lady contributed about 10% of their income ($75,560) to churches and charity, which included the Red Cross and Salvation Army for U.S. hurricane relief and earthquake aid to Pakistan. They also gave organizations that feed the poor. Their property taxes on their Crawford, TX ranch came to $26,172, an increase of $4,000 from the year before.

I'm sure you heard that the Vice President and Mrs. Cheney reported income of $8.82 million, which was mostly from income from exercising stock options they hadset aside for charity in 2001, of which they donated $6.87 million last year to charity. After their contributions they had $1.95 million left on which they paid $529,636 in taxes. The Vice President's salary amounts to $205,031.

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