RE: "Last time I read about taxes -The top 20% pay over 70%."
"Newest Data Show High-Income Taxpayers Earning and Paying More; Top One Percent Earned Almost a Fifth of the Nation’s Income, Paid Over 36 Percent of the Nation’s Federal Individual Income Taxes.
According to preliminary data released by the Internal Revenue Service, the top-earning one percent of U.S. taxpayers (annual income over $293,415) made 19.5 percent of the income earned in 1999 and paid 36.2 percent of the total federal individual income taxes collected that year. This fraction of the tax burden paid by the top one percent--well over a third of the total--is up from 25.2 percent ten years earlier in tax year 1989 (data for 1999 is the latest available).
At the other end of the income spectrum, the bottom 50 percent of the nation's taxpayers earned only 13.3 percent of all income in 1999, but they paid an even smaller fraction of the federal individual income taxes collected--4.0 percent.
The data come from a Tax Foundation Special Report, titled, "Who Pays the Federal Individual Income Tax?" by economist David Hoffman.
"Americans at the upper end of the income scale continue to bear an increasing share of the total federal individual income tax burden," observed Hoffman. "Economic growth was still very strong in 1999, and in a progressive tax system like ours, economic growth inevitably results in a steady shifting of the tax burden up the income scale."
taxfoundation.org
As the table shows, the top five percent of income earners (adjusted gross income over $120,846) and the top 10 percent (adjusted gross income over $87,682) both pay a significantly greater portion of federal individual income taxes than they did a decade ago. In fact, the tax load has since shifted upward so dramatically that whereas a decade earlier in 1989, approximately 55% of all federal income tax collections came from the top 10 percent of income earners, 1999 data shows that percentage is now paid by just the top five percent."
taxfoundation.org
Best wishes,
I2 |
