{"id":73131,"date":"2019-07-09T21:47:26","date_gmt":"2019-07-10T04:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.questionpro.com\/blog\/?p=73131"},"modified":"2019-07-09T21:47:26","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T04:47:26","slug":"how-african-americans-feel-about-taxes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.questionpro.com\/blog\/how-african-americans-feel-about-taxes\/","title":{"rendered":"How African Americans feel about taxes"},"content":{"rendered":"

The richest man in history was a king named Mansa Musa, who ruled most of western Africa in the 14th century. King Musa possessed so much wealth that merely to travel he would be accompanied by a 60,000-strong caravan comprised of 1,000 attendants, 100 camels loaded with gold, bands of personal musicians, and 500 slaves bearing golden staffs. He would hand out so much gold to the poor when visiting a nation that inflation would balloon to the point of economic ruin.<\/p>\n

To put more in perspective, you could combine the wealth of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett and it would hardly register in King Musa\u2019s financial ledgers.<\/p>\n

And like Bezos, Gates, and Buffet, he probably paid no taxes.<\/p>\n

Same as it ever was, right? It\u2019s the middle class, poor, and (normal) rich like Lebron James who pay taxes \u2013 not our demigods \u2013 and it\u2019s certainly the case with the African American community.<\/p>\n

But how do African Americans feel about taxes when not dreaming of being King Musa (okay, more like Lebron)? How did the recent tax season treat them in Trump America?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the finding of a recent QuestionPro\/Ebony joint study. The study surveyed 700 African Americans, equally across all demographics. Blacks may not be as angry as the rulers who saw the collapse of their kingdom when King Musa passed by with his bags of gold, but they\u2019re not exactly in tax-shelter heaven.<\/p>\n

Fair taxes or a taxing time?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

We should probably deal first with the Republican tax plan, passed in December of 2017. How did it affect African Americans? Forty-seven percent of respondents disapprove of the tax plan, while only 18 percent approve. It should be mentioned that a majority of participants (50 percent) view themselves as Democrats \u2013 with 23 percent identifying as Independents and only 13 percent as Republicans. Beyond labels, 37 percent see their political views as moderate, 25 percent as liberal, and 16 percent as conservative.<\/p>\n

Did the Republican tax plan translate into higher taxes for African Americans? Thirty-one percent claimed that their federal taxes went up this year \u2013 with 27 percent saying they stayed the same and 21 percent saying they went down. Twenty percent in the study stated they didn\u2019t know if their taxes went up are down, and for those, perhaps that has to do with preparation and recording.<\/p>\n

But who is preparing taxes in the African American community? Most participants (36 percent) say they personally prepared their taxes in 2019. The rest of the breakdown is even:<\/p>\n