The top 1 percent of America’s households — families with incomes over $450,000 in 2008 — will receive 31 percent of the benefits from the Bush 2001 and 2003 tax cuts over the next ten years if these tax cuts are made permanent.
-Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, The 2001 and 2003 Tax Cuts, March 5, 2009
In 2009, 70.4 percent of the tax savings from the Bush tax rate cuts on capital gains and dividend income will go to the nation’s top 1 percent, taxpayers who report $1,661,900 in average income. Just 2.9 percent of the tax savings in 2009 will go to households who make under $75,000. These households make up 81.6 percent of the taxpaying public.
-Citizens for Tax Justice, Capital Gains and Dividends Tax Cuts Offer Almost No Benefit to Middle-Income Americans and Add to the Nation’s Fiscal Problems, May 13, 2008.
Between 1986 and 2006, the top 1 percent of U.S. households almost doubled their share of the nation’s income, from 11.3 percent of the total to 22.1 percent. Over that same span, the share of top 1 percent income paid in federal income tax dropped by nearly a third, from 33.1 to 22.8 percent.
-Source: Kyle Mudry and Justin Bryan, Individual Income Tax Rates and Shares, 2006, Statistics of Income Bulletin, Winter 2009, Internal Revenue Service
Between 1986 and 2006, the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers saw the share of their income paid in federal income taxes drop 32.1 percent. The bottom 99 percent of Americans, in those same years, saw the share of their incomes paid in federal income tax drop just 20.1 percent.
-Source: Kyle Mudry and Justin Bryan, Individual Income Tax Rates and Shares, 2006, Statistics of Income Bulletin, Winter 2009, Internal Revenue Service
In 2006, the most recent year with complete IRS statistics available, taxpayers with incomes over $2 million paid 23 percent of their incomes, on average, in federal income tax. A half-century earlier, in 1955, taxpayers who made the equivalent of over $2 million, after adjusting for inflation, paid 49 percent of their incomes in federal income tax.
-John Cavanagh, Chuck Collins, Alison Goldberg, and Sam Pizzigati, Tax Day 2009: Reversing the Great Tax Shift, Institute for Policy Studies and Wealth for the Common Good, April 2009.
In 2004, America’s most affluent 10 percent paid, on average, 17.1 percent of their income in federal, state, and local taxes. The next highest 10 percent paid 19.1 percent of their incomes in total taxes.
-Source: Ajit Zacharias, Edward N. Wolff, and Thomas Masterson, New Estimates of Economic Inequality in America, 1959–2004, The Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, April 2009
America’s 400 most affluent taxpayers in 1955 reported incomes that averaged, in today’s dollars, $12.3 million. These 400, after loopholes, paid 51.2 percent of their total incomes in federal income tax. In 2006, the top 400 averaged $263 million in income — and paid just 17.2 percent of that in federal tax.
-Too Much, Is Taxing the Super Rich a Waste of Time? March 9, 2009
In 2010, the top marginal income tax rate in Britain will rise to 50 percent. The top rate in the United States, unless Congress and the White House repeal Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy, will remain at 35 percent. Last year, the United States had the lowest top tax rate among the world’s major industrial nations. No other major economic power had a top rate under 40 percent.
-Source: KPMG, Individual income tax rate survey 2008, October 2008
Overall, after taxes, America’s very rich — the top 0.01 percent — have nearly quadrupled their share of the nation’s income since 1979. This top 0.01 percent averaged $24.3 million, after taxes, in 2005. Between 1979 and 2005, the after-tax share of the nation’s income that went to middle-income Americans — households that made between $45,200 and $67,400 in 2005 — dropped by 12.7 percent.
Congressional Budget Office, Historical Effective Tax Rates, 1979 to 2005: Supplement with Additional Data on Sources of -Income and High-Income Households, December 23, 2008
In 2008, taxpayers in the nation’s poorest 20 percent — average income, $12,000 — paid 11.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes. Taxpayers in the top 1 percent averaged $1,445,000 and paid 8.2 percent of that in state and local taxes.
-Incomes and Federal, State, and Local Taxes in 2008, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy Tax Model, April 2009