The above chart captures the essence of what I've been talking about without the benefit of numbers. I don't know what took me so long to do the math. Anyway I'm going to excerpt a big chunk of text from the The Tax Foundation:
To put the Obama plan in context, it is important to understand how divided America's tax burden already is between a large group of Americans who pay little or nothing and a shrinking group of upper-income taxpayers who shoulder the lion's share of the burden. For example:
* In 1999, about 30 million tax filers had no income tax liability after taking advantage of their credits and deductions. By 2006, the number of non-payers had grown to nearly 44 million, one-third of all income tax filers.
* According to the Congressional Budget Office, in 2005, the top 20 percent of households paid 86.3 percent of income taxes while the bottom 80 percent paid a collective 13.7 percent of the income tax burden. The top 1 percent of households paid 38.8 percent of income taxes.
* Looking at all federal taxes, in 1990, the bottom 80 percent of households paid 42 percent of the tax burden while the top 1 percent of households paid about 16 percent. By 2005, the share of all federal taxes paid by the bottom 80 percent of households had fallen to 31 percent, while the share paid by the wealthiest households had risen to nearly 28 percent.
* A recent Tax Foundation study found that in 2004, the nation's tax and spending policies redistributed more than $1 trillion in income from the top 40 percent of American households to the bottom 60 percent of households.
Ouch. I've been looking for some facts to support rhetoric 'soak the rich', but it turns out to be worse than I thought. Not that I'm so rich that I'm going to get soaked, but this is just punitive.
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