The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial with statistics purported to show that the wealthiest americans are paying a larger share of the tax burden then they did 20 years ago. (There is no free link, but excerpts of it are here.) For example, the chart shows that the top .1% paid 5% of all taxes in 1979, and 11% in 1999.
Sounds pretty cut and dried, right? Well, except for a few pesky facts that they left out. During that same period while their percentage of the tax burden more than doubled from 5% to 11%, their percentage of the total income more than tripled, from 3% to 9%! When you make most of the money, you pay most of the taxes. As the gap between the wealthiest and the average american has grown, the tax burden has in fact clearly become more regressive. A more eloquent breakdown is here and here.
Who's betting the Journal will bother to correct their glaring (and frankly embarrassing) omission?
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1 comment:
Nice follow up from the site of the original quote. Indeed, the rich are getting remarkably richer.
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