WASHINGTON — New York is where the 1 percent live — and they have the tax returns to prove it. Nine of the 10 U.S. neighborhoods that pay the most taxes are in the city’s metropolitan area, Internal Revenue Service data show.
The nine neighborhoods, which range from Manhattan to Fairfield County, Conn., accounted for 0.2 percent of all federal income-tax filers in 2008, the latest year for which data are available, according to IRS statistics.
They reported $70.1 billion, or 0.9 percent, of the nation’s total adjusted gross income and paid 1.6 percent of all individual income taxes.
The $16.5 billion paid in the nine ZIP codes is enough to match the combined economies of the Bahamas, Fiji and Tajikistan.
This breakdown can be used to counter arguments by anti-Wall Street demonstrators who claim to represent “99 percent” of Americans and say the rich should be taxed more, said Mitchell Moss, an urban policy professor at New York University’s Wagner School.
“We’re subsidizing the slackers in the rest of the country,” Moss said. “This is the most productive part of the United States of America, in terms of taxes paid.”
The share of taxes paid in the New York neighborhoods “is irrelevant and a distortion of the fact that as a percentage, wealthy people pay far less as a portion of their earnings,” said Karanja Gaçuça, an Occupy Wall Street spokesman who identifies himself as a former Deutsche Bank analyst.
The only ZIP code outside the New York area to make the top 10 was a west Houston suburb that accounted for $1.5 billion in federal individual income taxes.
The neighborhood includes the Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa, which George H.W. Bush listed as his primary residence during his presidency.
Nationally, the IRS showed, 137.7 million U.S. households paid $987.4 billion in federal taxes in 2008.
There’s no doubt that income inequality is growing. The Congressional Budget Office reported last month that after-tax income for the richest 1 percent of U.S. households grew 275 percent between 1979 and 2007.
For the lowest 20 percent, after-tax income grew 18 percent over the same period. And the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Manhattan and elsewhere are pressing for more taxes on the highest earners, or the “1 percent,” as one way to curb the growing income disparity.
The ZIP code with largest amount of individual tax collections in the U.S. is 10021, on New York’s Upper East Side.
The IRS data show 29,820 individual returns were filed from residents there, with total income taxes of $2.85 billion, or an average tax bill of $95,489. More than 93 percent of taxes in the ZIP code came from households with adjusted gross income greater than $200,000, IRS records show. Property owners include Stephen Schwarzman, founder and chairman of Blackstone Group; David Koch, co-owner of Koch Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held U.S. companies; and John Thain, chairman and chief executive of CIT Group.
