How much taxes are paid by the poor, middle class and rich

I wonder what percentage each person pays from their total income for each of the eight percentiles listed there. I think that, if anything, in my opinion, could possibly show inequality. An interesting view can be seen here http://vimeo.com/7857584 that is a pretty recent conference, so you might be unfamiliar with some of the things talked about, in that case, if you like to explore, there are torrents you can download and many forums on the site for discussion.

I find internet posts such as this exasperating for their intellectual dishonesty. The graph shows the data the way you described, which clearly shows that the top 1% make 18% of the total national income and pay 27% of the total income taxes. The system IS progressive already. The bottom 20% pay almost zero. Beyond all this is the unasked question as to the morality of asking anyone to pay a penny more in taxes while the government cavalierly wastes so much money. Clean up the spending before asking anyone to pay more of their own money.

Wise up! For every dollar the rich guy earns he pays 27 cents in tax. For every dollar the poor guy earns he pays 1 cent in tax. Just above the poverty line the guy pays 4 cents on the dollar. The rich guy pays 23% more than the guy just above the poverty line. That’s 23 cents on the dollar more. And it progresses on up the way progressives like it.
Should the uneducated street sweeper make as much as the business man? Should the business man be taxed to the point where he can’t expand his business and provide more jobs for street sweepers and raise their wages? Is it fair to tax the business man or ‘punish’ him because he is successful and provides jobs for street sweepers?
What some of you are talking about is pure socialism and you should look at other countries that have tried it and see how badly it turned out there! That or you are just bitter because you can’t get above street sweeper grade wages yourself and want a handout!

Accorind to IRS tax figures in 2010,  the 400 wealthiest Americans paid, on average, just under 17% in taxes.  Although their reported tax rates are much higher, the combination of a 15% captial gains tax and tax credits and other deductions make their real tax rate much lower.  Repeal of the Bush-era tax cuts would level the field a little bit and help reduce our debt.  Federal spending needs to be reduced as well.

looking at the graph is is still slightly skewed.

The bottom of the the top 1%’s tax bracket is the 1.5 million, which by the way is 98 times more than the 15,900 that the bottom 20% make, that you show, but there is no ceiling to that top 1%, there are billionaires and several who make hundreds of millions yearly.

Yes compared to the bottom 20%’s they absolutely pay more, but they do make a monstrous amount more. The top 1% would pay 35% in taxes this year which at the very minimum they would still leave $1,013,025. Well above any cost of living income in the world.

The bottom 20% will pay 15% in taxes which at the very maximum would only leave 13,515 approximately 75 times less money, and thousands less than minimum cost of living average in the US. Yes the percentages show that they pay more in taxes but they make literally tens of times more in income.

At most you can say this is fair. Taxes absolutely shouldn’t be raised on individuals because they truly pay enough, this graph says that and I believe that with my own personal opinion.

Government spending and corporate taxes are where all of our money is going. This is a statement that has no party affiliations.  Dems and Rep are greedy and too focused on how powerful their party is rather than focused on how to fix the country’s economic problems. Neither side will allow a good idea to thrive if it came from the opposing party, regardless of how good the idea is.

Lisa Belise does know how to read a graph.  A more charitable translation of Stock-MD’s emotions if not actual post might be that the top 1% make 18% of the income. (We’ve heard that already!).  So how many percent from the bottom do we need to get to this same 18% of income?  Well, the percentiles aren’t broken out enough to know for sure, but let’s estimate 4%+8+(half of 13%), which corresponds to about the bottom half (50%), 2-1/2 quintiles. 

So seeing the top 1% make what the bottom 50% makes probably drives some people crazy.  The fact they can’t think and/or write drives a bunch of others crazy (but unfortunately, quite a bit fewer).  If we progress to the third column, we see the top 1% pays 27% in taxes and if we add, starting again from the bottom, to get to the same 27%, we get 1%+4%+9%+(about three-fourths of 17%) to get to about 27%.  So the top 1%  pays about the same taxes as about the bottom halfm which drives yet another bunch of people crazy (but probably not that bottom half).

P.S.  I’d like to see “people,” “national income” and “taxes” explained in a footnote as there’s a lot of devil in the details.  Is this just federal income taxes.  I didn’t study the cited CBO report enough so the answer is probably in there, but the graph should always go with the definitions.

top 5 needs to pay more taxes LOL

This is old data from 2005. The rich are much richer now then they were then. The top 1% earn 25% of all income. 

http://csainvestor.blogspot.com/

Income
is one thing what about wealth! http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Top 20% of earners
own 93% of financial wealth and 85% of total net worth. Is this fair?
Is this progressive? Have the rich earned this? More importantly is this
sustainable? 

Some other sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2011/09/04/opinion/04reich-graphic.html   (cited at bottom of article)

http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/pikettyqje.pdf 
(up to 1998)

Many, many
more. 

Capital gains is basically triple-taxation; the original earnings were taxed, the appreciation is taxed, and the portion of appreciation consumed by inflation is taxed. It should be eliminated completely, not used as a tool to artificially change the way the imaginary pie-slices are divvied up.

nice.  now change the middle column to ‘..have this much disposable income’

That doesn’t seem responsive.  Admittedly, the impact of taxes varies from state to state and from community to community.  Nevertheless, any chart ignores economic reality when it looks at only one set of taxes and ignores others and then concludes that the rich pay far more than their fare share.

What you are overlooking is that the system of dollars (as opposed to production) is zero sum (give or take fed inflation).  The system of production responds to the wealth owned by spenders (the bottom 99%).  This means that if too much money accumulates with the savers, opportunities to sell go down even as money chasing opportunities go up and normal business investment gets replaced by asset bubbles, loans to the shrinking middle class to “try to keep it going” and eventual crash when things get unsustainable.

If you are right, we would have done better under the Reagan-Bush-Bush period of 20 years when we had the second lowest tax rate and probably the worst period for unions of the last century.  Instead we had the second worst period of graft in the last century and ZERO combined per capita inflation-adjusted GDP growth for that period.

The only period we had that was worse was the 1920-1933 period where the same issues played out much faster because the laissez faire was even more extreme and the money supply was limited by the gold standard.  

Looking back we all know that the great depression ended in 1933, but it didn’t have to be that way.  We could have kept shrinking the middle class for years longer and eventually ended up like Mexico if we had had the political will to keep pure unrestrained capitalism going in such a way that the producers have little to no bargaining ability and the owners have all the power.

Not really.  Check out the Saez figures at UC for what happens if you include all taxes.  From memory, I think the richest 20% earn 59% of the wealth and pay 63% of the taxes.  In other words very slightly progressive.

When you consider that money rapidly accumulating in the hands of the rich leads inevitably to a vicious deflationary cycle and Depression, as we saw clearly in the 1920-1932 period, we have to ask ourselves is it worth it?

Also, I see lots of people complaining that the government cavalierly wastes money.  Do you have evidence?  Or is this simply a “How long have you been beating your wife?” question that you like to use to make your case when you don’t have facts?

a better graph might be to show what percentage of their income each group pays in taxes. A $100 electric bill to a millionaire is nothing while that same bill may mean no food for a poor person

It would be interesting to add Social Security and Medicare taxes to this, as those taxes would be a flat percentage until roughly $100K of income, and then would disappear. They would make the federal tax system less progressive.