[zeugma]

These are interesting figures that I've seen before. I have no hope for the ultimate prosperity of this Republic and have not once I discovered (at an early age) the implications of the scam whereby Peter gets to vote to take away Paul's money.

That said, I'd like to see some hard numbers regarding ratios of income/wealth broken out in much the same way as the numbers were in the article.

For instance, if the top 5% of americans make 30% of the income of the nation, yet pay 80% of the taxes, that is truely an evil situation. If, however, the top 5% made 80% of the income and payed 80% of the taxes, the situation would still be evil (as income taxes are by definition IMO), but somewhat less so.

Do any freepers on this thread have or have seen such data?

[ancient_geezer]

From the CBO link in reply #2 you can find the tax shares with respect to family income shares, as well as many other applicable measures presented in time series tables.

http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=1545&from=4&sequence=0

To answer your question in 1999 the

Top 5%:

accounts for 27% of the total family income and

paid 37% of total federal taxes(individual, payroll, corporate, estates etc.)

Top 1%

accounts for 15% of the total family income and

paid 21% of total federal taxes.

Another statistical source more detailed tax, income, expenditure, home ownership etc. information arranged in annual ftp folders for 1984 through 2000 though the narrowest slice is quintile data:

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/