When the Wall Street Journal editorialized last week, "According to Internal Revenue Service data, the entire taxable income of everyone earning over $100,000 in 2008 was about $1.582 trillion. Even if all these Americans—most of whom are far from wealthy—were taxed at 100%, it wouldn't cover Mr. Obama's deficit for this year," FutureOfCapitalism questioned the numbers in a posting here. I wrote:
I went looking for this data on the IRS Web site (the Journal editorial has no hyperlinks, disappointingly) and found numbers for both 2008 and 2007, which was more of a boom year. By my calculations from those spreadsheets total taxable income of filers above $100,000 was $3.76 trillion in 2007 and $3.4 trillion in 2008, of which those earners were already paying $862 billion in income tax before credits in 2007 and $797 billion in income tax before credits in 2008.
Now, without correcting the editorial from last week, the Journal has gone and issued a brand new editorial, asserting:
Consider the Internal Revenue Service's income tax statistics for 2008, the latest year for which data are available....The IRS data are broken down at $100,000, yet taxing all income above that level throws up only $3.4 trillion.
Looks like the Journal is now using the $3.4 trillion figure that was in the FutureOfCapitalism post, not the $1.582 trillion figure that was in its original editorial.