A graph

[essentialsaltes]

Business Insider has provided a nice display on 'What the Wall Street Protesters are Angry About'

It's worth a read, though some of them I can't get all that upset about. What's that? Rich people are rich?

But let's turn to Figure 7


The top 20% of earners pay 64.3% of the taxes paid. That means they're paying more than three times their per capita 'fair share'.

Oh but wait, that top 20% earns 59.1% of the income. So their share of taxes works out to being 8.8% greater than their per-income 'fair share'. Woohoo! Soak the rich! Make them pay... 9% more.

Of course, those deadbeats at the bottom barely pay 54% of their fair share. Then again, they only have 3.5% of the total income. Hardly worth taking.

Comments

[ian-tiberius.livejournal.com]

Donovan - where are your figures from?

The chart that appears at Mike's link, directly above the chart Mike cited (I'm referring to the one labeled "Figure 6") indicates that the top 1% pay 30.8% of their income in taxes. (This is more or less in line with all of the top 40%.)

If their effective tax rate is pretty much the same as everyone else in the top half, I don't see how one could square that with the idea that the top 1% make 14% of the money but pay 40% of the taxes. Is it possible that the figure you're citing is for federal income taxes only and excludes payroll taxes?

[donovan k. loucks (from livejournal.com)]

I got it from the IRS's tax statistics:

http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/indtaxstats/article/0,,id=129270,00.html

However, note that I didn't say that the top 1% paid 40% of "their income in taxes" but that the top 1% pay 40% of THE taxes.

[donovan k. loucks (from livejournal.com)]

I got my information from the IRS's tax statistics page:

http://www.irs.gov/taxstats/indtaxstats/article/0,,id=129270,00.html

Regardless, I'm not sure where your confusion lies. There's no way to directly square one statistic with the other without more data. If it helps, think of it this way: If the top 1% made 99% of the money, they'd pay 99% of the taxes even if everyone's tax rate were only 5%.

[essentialsaltes.livejournal.com]

It might be federal only, which definitely is a lot more squished toward the upper end. The bottom 50% pays a whopping 2.7% of the federal taxes paid.

(Oh, and table 1 here shows the top 1% having 20% of the total AGI & with average tax rate of 23% (though again that's federal only))