Sunday, October 19, 2008

The Top 10 Percent of Income Earners Paid 70 Percent of Federal Income Tax

http://www.heritage.org/research/features/BudgetChartBook/fed-rev-spend-2008-boc-T4-The-Top-10-Percent-of-Income.html

The Top 10 Percent of Income Earners Paid 70 Percent of Federal Income Tax
The U.S. tax system is highly progressive. The top 1 percent of income earners, by household, paid 39 percent of all federal income taxes in 2005, whereas the bottom 50 percent paid a little over 3 percent. Further, 32 percent of all tax returns filed in 2005 were from people who paid no federal income tax at all.

Levels of Household Income Earners and their Proportion of the Federal Income Tax in 2005

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The top 10 percent of the population carried away some 48.5 percent of all reported income in the US in 2005—also the highest percentage since 1928, on the eve of the Depression—an increase of 2 percent from 2004, and up from 33 percent of the reported total in the late 1970s.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/inco-m30.shtml

Anonymous said...

That is the number I wanted to see. People don't relly understand numbers and therefore politicians can interpret these theri way and most people cannot tell the difference. Yes, the top 1% paid 39% of federal taxes but yet made 48% of the total income. Should they not pay 48% of the totla federal taxes then??

Anonymous said...

That is the number I wanted to see. People don't really understand numbers and therefore politicians can interpret these their way and most people cannot tell the difference. Yes, the top 1% paid 39% of federal taxes but yet made 48% of the total income. Should they not pay 48% of the total federal taxes then??

Dustin said...

32 percent of all tax returns with positive adjusted gross income, 43 million total, filed in 2006 were from people who paid no federal income tax at all. THAT is the pathetic part