Originally Posted by
Hockey Guy
Whatever.
Another indicator of this reversal in the income and tax shares of the top 1 percent is that,
as in 2008, the top 1 percent no longer pays a larger percentage of total income tax than the bottom 95 percent. This trend was exacerbated by the aforementioned precipitous drop in AGI in 2009. During 2009, the bottom 95 percent (AGI under $154,643) paid 41.3 percent of the total collected, a larger share than the 36.7 percent paid by the top 1 percent (AGI over $343,947).
http://taxfoundation.org/article/sum...ome-tax-data-0
I guess you enjoyed reading this story?
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb...ik24-2010feb24
Read again what you quoted.
First off, even that article claims that the "bottom 95%" (a tricky of saying everyone but the top 5%) paid 41.3% of total income tax collected.
The top 1% paid 36.7%.
I'd say that's definitely paying your fair share. They're 1% of the population, and yet they are paying almost as much as 95% of the population in taxes. So for every dollar that 95% of the country paid in income taxes in 2009, the richest 1% paid 89 cents. That's more than fair, given that there's 95 times as many people in the first group.
But second, the article mentions that the reason for this drop (the 1% was previously paying more) was "the aforementioned precipitous drop in AGI in 2009". So the rich people took a bath in 2009 (most likely due to the real estate crash), and therefore didn't pay as much in taxes.
Now that the economy has recovered somewhat since then, I bet the 1% is again paying more taxes than the 95%.
Bottom line: Nobody can say the rich aren't paying their fair share. To soak them for even more at this point is simply not fair.