Recent letters to the editor have taken the position that our upper-income earners are paying an unfairly high share of taxes. Please allow me to set the record straight.

Right now, our upper-income earners are taxed at the lowest rate since World War II. At the end of World War II, individuals earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $400,000 paid 91 percent in federal income taxes for incomes over these amounts. When President Reagan took office, that excess income figure was still 75 percent; when he left office, it was 50 percent, and today it is 35 percent of additional incomes over $311,950 for individuals or families. Income taxes on our upper-income earners are also the lowest among all the industrial nations in the world.

The gap between the rich and the poor is the largest since World War II (“Statistical Abstract of the United States,” 2002), is larger than that of Japan or any of the industrialized countries of Europe (see World Bank, World Development Report, 2000-2001), and we also have the highest rate of child poverty among the 20 most industrialized countries in the world (UNICEF as reported in “The Economist,” June 7, 2000). And what holds true for income distribution inequality holds true even more for accumulated wealth.

Few people realize that the wealthiest 5 percent in our country own over 81 percent of all stocks, 87 percent of all bonds and 85 percent of all businesses (see Federal Reserve Board of Governors Working Papers, April 2000).

Bill Gates is now worth about $75 billion. Can you imagine that if you earned $100,000 a year it would take you 750,000 years to accumulate that much money? I recognize what he has done and accomplished and his substantial charitable donations, but does he really need a tax rebate to expand his business? We are No. 1 among the industrialized countries in the world in billionaires and in children living in poverty, No. 1 in wealth and income inequality, No. 1 in big homes and in homelessness. Not since 1929, the eve of the Great Depression, has wealth in our country been as unequally distributed as it is today.

I do not want to be misunderstood. I don’t want anyone to be deprived of the things they worked for. I am not rich, but I am certainly in the upper 25 percent, if not 18 percent or 20 percent of income-earners in the United States. My wife has quite a few pairs of shoes, loves new clothes and often buys them whether she needs them or not, and we can afford it. But that does not mean that we would not be happy to pay a few percentage points more in income taxes if it benefited the less fortunate. Does that make me a bleeding-heart liberal? I don’t know.

Every day and every night I thank God for the blessings he has bestowed on me and my family in this great land of ours. But I admit that my heart goes out to the disadvantaged, the parents who don’t have enough money for grandpa’s medicines, the single mother whose husband died and left her with two children, and who has to choose between more food for the children or a slightly higher temperature in their home on cold winter nights. Anyhow, I thought that then-Gov. Bush told us four years ago that conservatives are now compassionate conservatives, so I find it difficult to think that they would object to those kinds of feelings.

Finally, on the question whether these tax rebates help stimulate the economy and create jobs, my opinion as a professional economist is that they are likely to have but a minimal effect. My wife and I got a $600 tax rebate in 2002. By how much did this increase our expenditures? Not by one cent; we did not spend one penny that we would not have spent anyhow. But give these $600 rebates to a hungry or homeless person, and that money will start circulating immediately. And when the poor spend more money and buy more goods, the wealthy investors will surely provide them, tax refund or not.

How then is it that our economy seems to be improving gradually? In my opinion that is largely due to our enormous deficit. If we are spending a half a trillion dollars, 500 billion dollars a year more than we are taking in, this kind of expenditures must have an enormous effect since, as I emphasize in my classes, every dollar spent becomes a dollar earned, and no one can get a dollar without someone else spending it.

Harry G. Shaffer is a professor emeritus of economics at Kansas University.