Who's paying taxes?

According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription is required) the top 1% of earners pay 35% of our taxes.  That would be as of 2004.

Americans who earned more than $1 million in adjusted gross income paid $178 billion, or an average of $740,000 per filer, in income taxes in 2004. That's up about one-third from 2002, the year before the Bush tax cuts in marginal income-tax and dividend and capital gains rates. The wealthiest 1% of tax filers paid a remarkable 35% of all individual income-tax payments that year.

Yes, we know: Some will claim that this merely shows that the Bush tax cuts made the rich richer. In fact, the Statistics of Income data reveal that there were more Americans filing taxes in every income category from $50,000 and up in 2004. In other words, Americans across income categories were (and are) making more money thanks to the buoyant economy spurred in part by the tax cut.

Liberals are left to stoke class envy with talk about the "gap between the rich and the poor", a particularly meaningless statistic when just about everybody is moving up in income.   

Comments

[joan]

"just about everybody is moving up in income" Look at the data at
http://www.visualizingeconomics.com/category/graph/
and see if you still can say that. More information also in a report from th IRS
http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/06asapetska.pdf

[Tom Bowler]

How about if you look at this and tell me you can't.