Who are the '47 percent'?

Half don't earn enough to pay federal income taxes; many pay other ways.

So who are the 47 percent?

Well, about half of them don't owe income tax for the simple reason that they don't make enough money. A couple with two children with an income of $26,400 had no income tax liability in 2011, because of an $11,600 standard deduction and four exemptions of $3,700 each, according to the Tax Policy Center (TPC).

"The basic structure of the income tax simply exempts subsistence levels of income from tax," wrote TPC's Roberton Williams in an analysis of these figures last year.

The other half of the untaxed (that's equal to about 23 percent of total US households) claims their status because of particular tax breaks. Many of them are seniors who benefit from the exclusion of some Social Security income. The elderly make up about one-fifth of all non-income-tax-payers. The other big chunk is parents who benefit from tax credits for children and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC).

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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