I'm gonna have to jump on board the wagon with that being a bad figure, got some others - Edit 1
Before modification by Isaac at 14/04/2011 07:48:47 PM
I've only got 2007 CBO data, but I think page 6 from the report linked below is probably more trustworthy on this score, I'm sure the values changed but not that much, and that has the top 1% paying 28.1% of all federal taxes and 39.5% of all income taxes, going to (for income taxes) 61% for top 5%, 73% for the top 10%, and the top quintile being 86%, top quintile also doing 69% of all federal taxes and having an avg pre-tax household income of 265k, this is all by household, no adjustments for household size. Next Quintile does another 12.7% of income taxes (leaving 1.3% I guess for the remaining 60% of households) and 16.5% of all federal taxes leaving 14.4% of federal tax revenues for the lower 60% of households to generate, that appears to be boots balls and all but obviously wouldn't include things like gas tax. Again that's on page 6, 2006 data on page 7, if there's '08 data I don't know where it is and I doubt there's anything more recent. I won't claim the CBO to be the source of all that is pure and true and objective but I don't think we can do much better.