Following the flap over our Tax Policy Center colleague Bob Williams’s calculation that close to half of all families did not pay income tax in 2009, we thought it would be instructive to take a look at history. It turns out that over the past five decades, there have been other periods when families with close to average incomes have been exempt from the income tax, and that their current exemption levels were due to both Republican and Democratic efforts to reduce taxes for moderate-income households and to find alternatives to welfare.
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