Taxes

A much quoted statistic is that top 5% of wage earners pay for 60% of the taxes. However, that is a severe distortion of statistics. Below is the information from tax year 2006

AGI	%returns	%income	%taxes
1MM and up	0.3	15.1	26.7
500k-1MM	0.4	5.0	9.2
200-500k	2.2	11.1	17.3
100-200k	8.8	20.0	20.4
50-100k	21.6	26.4	18.0
$1-50k	66.7	22.4	8.4

So, from this table, top 2.9% pay for the 53.2% of the taxes. So, top 5% paying 60% is about right. However, this is a severe manipulation of stats. A more fair way of presenting the data is that those making top 31.1% of income pays 53.2% of taxes.

Even this presentation is a distortion. The first column is not Gross income, but the ADJUSTED Gross Income. This means that deductions have already been deducted from the actual income. So, it's easily conceivable that the top 2 tiers (top .7%) actually receive 2-3x more income than actually shown in AGI. At 2x, it would bring their income to roughly the amount of tax that they pay, at 3x, it means that they would be paying a lower rate than avg of the rest 99% of the population.

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