Surprise! The 1% Are Paying Their Fair Share

Barron's ^ | 4/7/2012 | GENE EPSTEIN

[Beave Meister]

Call them the Fantastic Four. Only four taxpayers have the distinction of making the Internal Revenue Service's anonymous list of the 400 highest-income filers in every one of the 17 years (1992-2008) for which the IRS has collected such data. Just 27% of the wealthiest filers have made the top-400 list more than once, and just 15% more than twice.

Even a one-time trip through this gilded door is surely a thrill, however. In 2008, entry into the favored 400 required a minimum adjusted gross income of $109.7 million, down from a cutoff of $138.8 million in '07—a decline that must have had a lot to do with the fall in asset prices. We can infer that from another striking fact: A disproportionate 57% of AGI for the top 400 came from capital gains in '08, down from 66% in '07.

The revolving door for the über-rich has been noted in other research. Setting $1 million in pretax income as the threshold, the Tax Foundation, a research group, found that from 1999 through 2007, "roughly half of millionaires were only millionaires once during the nine-year period," and "only 6% were millionaires in all nine years," with capital gains also accounting for an outsize share of income.

[Beave Meister]

This data does not fit the libtard agenda.