Larry Blanchard wrote:

On Sun, 31 Aug 2008 15:12:52 -0700, Mark & Juanita wrote:

The graduated income tax in
which the top 50% of wage earners pay 96.9% of taxes, the top 10% pay
70.3% and the top 1% pay 39.4%

And what percent of earnings do these groups have?

OK, that was painful, the IRS web site is a bit harder to navigate than it
used to be, however, from: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/06in01etr.xls,
for tax year 2006:

Top Total Income Tax Revenue (%) Adjusted Gross Income Share (%)
50% 97.01 87.49
25% 86.27 68.16
10% 70.79 47.32
5% 60.14 36.66
1% 39.89 22.06

So, from the IRS data: the bottom 50% are making 12.5% of adjusted gross
income and paying less than 3% of all income taxes while the top 1% are
making 22% of adjusted gross income while paying nearly 40% of all federal
income taxes.

Bet that's not where you were going with this, was it?

Oh, and just to further emphasize how the Bush tax cuts have so benefited
the rich, the following are the data for the tax years from 2000 to 2006

Year Total Income Tax (%) AGI Share (%) Ratio (Tax/AGI)
2000 37.42 20.81 1.80
2001 33.89 17.53 1.93
2002 33.71 16.12 2.09
2003 34.27 16.77 2.04
2004 36.89 19.00 1.94
2005 39.38 21.20 1.86
2006 39.89 22.06 1.81

So, despite the "massive tax cuts to benefit the wealthy", the % share of
taxes relative to the % share of AGI has hardly moved, and during the years
immediately following 9/11 when the left-wing was bleating about how the
rich were benefiting from the tax cuts for the wealthy, the top 1% were
actually paying a greater share of their income to the treasury than they
were during the last year of the Clinton presidency.


--
If you're going to be dumb, you better be tough