Posted on 08/08/2009 2:20:07 PM PDT by reaganaut1
The top 1 percent of tax filers earned about 22.8 percent of the nation's income in 2007 (the latest IRS data available), and paid 40.4 percent of all federal income taxes - more than the bottom 95 percent of tax filers combined, according to a Tax Foundation analysis of just-released IRS data.
Both income and income tax shares for the top 1 percent of tax returns (AGI over $410,096) hit all-time highs in 2007. In Fiscal Fact No. 183, "Summary of Latest Federal Individual Income Tax Data," Tax Foundation Senior Economist Gerald Prante notes that the record-setting trend for income and income tax shares is likely to end with 2007, given the economic downturn in 2008.
"This pattern at the top of the income spectrum is the same during almost every recession and recovery," according to Prante. "Unlike middle-income wage-earners whose incomes and tax liabilities are fairly steady, high-income people have incomes and tax liabilities that fluctuate wildly with the economy. The sharp rise in federal government tax revenue from 2003 to 2007 is likely to be followed by a substantial dip in 2008, 2009 and perhaps 2010 as the economy struggles through the worst recession since the early 1980s."
Fiscal Fact No. 183, available online at http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/250.html, also takes a look for the first time at the top 0.1 percent of tax returns (the top 10 percent of the top 1 percent), which amounts to only 141,000 tax returns, but accounts for nearly 12 percent of AGI earned and around 20 percent of the nation's federal individual income taxes.
(Excerpt) Read more at taxfoundation.org ...
I wouldn’t weep for the top 1% of income tax filers. They’re doing quite well.
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You sound like a Democrat.
I hope the limousine liberals in the top 1% don’t mind when middle-class people like me drop out of the system. If illegals and poor people live like kings in the USA, I’m confident nothing bad will happen to me when I drift from working to collecting unemployment to collecting welfare.
Says a lot about the disparity between the ultra rich and the rest of us.
“They’re doing quite well”
I guess they were just “lucky” ... /sarc
Well, personally I don't want Bill Gates himself to pay more than 20% tax, and less for the rest of us.
The highest tax rate Congress passes should also be applied to themselves, no deductions
Yeah, now you're getting with the modern spirit! Those top one-percenters are like an ATM for life's slackers - ca-chinng! It's not theft when the government makes it legal right?
ping
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