Over dinner on Saturday night, we started to wonder how much the bailout package meant for each person seated at the table.
How did we come up with this number? Being tax geeks, we decided that taking $700 billion and dividing it by the population of the United States is not really a valid number because there are Americans who file taxes who do not live in the United States, and not every person in the United States pays taxes individually.
So we started debating what the number is for individuals who actually file taxes. How much would each taxpayer figuratively pay for this bailout. We went to the IRS Data Book to find out how many taxpayers there were for 2006. We then took the number of taxpayers filing individual returns by the amount of the bailout. It looks like this:
*IRS Data Book 2004-2006. Includes Forms 1040, 1040A, 1040EZ, 1040NR, 1040NR-EZ, 1040-SS, 1040C filed for Fiscal Year 2006 from Table 2.
[tag]pension protection act, ppa, bailout package, $700 billion, ERISA[/tag]
