By the numbers...
In 2006, 134,372,678 US taxpayers filed returns with the IRS on income received in 2005. Of those returns, 43,779,597, or 32.5%, did not pay any federal income tax due to exemptions and credits. Of the 90,593,081 returns which reported taxable income, 40,081,459 were from married filing jointly, 2,004,781 married filing separately, 6,572,893 head of household, 33,793 surviving spouse and 41,900,155 filed as individuals. 81,170,334 exemptions were filed for dependent children, including children over 18 in college or disabled. 30% of US taxpayers have dependent children, with over 2/3rds living in married households.
3,949,703 (8.1%) of single taxpayers reported adjusted gross incomes over $75,000. For married couples, 3,045,750 (7.2%) filed tax returns with more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income. The IRS report for 2005 did not break down income for married filers between $100,000 and $200,000.
From these numbers, we can get a bit of an idea of where the "stimulus" checks will go.
55% of non-taxpayers filed as individuals, 45% as married. Thus we can extrapolate 24,078,778 individuals and 39,401,638 married taxpayers from the 43,779,597 mentioned above. However, approximately 3,000,000 households (single and family) have annual incomes below $3,000 cut off, so we after reducing and rounding, we get to around 62 million non-taxpayers receiving checks of $300 each for $18.6 billion.
84 million married and 48.5 million individual (totaling 132.5 million), each getting $600 for $79.5 billion.
Approximately $20 billion for dependents at $300 apiece, two-thirds going to 20% of taxpayers (married), with another third to the 10% of individual taxpayers with children.
I wanted to get these numbers up asap (since I've been working on them since 3am PST), but will update with more stats and some pie charts later today.
Update: Made a stupid addition error, now fixed.
