High Earners Part II

In my previous post, I referenced the IRS report on high earning Americans. Not only are the top 400 earners ephemeral (almost all of them won't be Top 400 earners more than once), but they also account for a huge amount of the income tax collected by the IRS.

Tax year 2010

Earners                           Number of Filers            Tax Paid          

Top 400                               400                             $19.1B

Bottom 50%                        67.5 million                $22.4B

In other words, 400 (not 400 thousand) tax filers pay about the same amount of tax as $68 MILLION people who earn the least (and of course, there are millions more that didn't have enough income to file).

So when someone contends that the Super Rich are not paying their fair share . . . . What would that fair share be?

High Earners: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

If you want to lash out at the the vile "high earners" in The United States, you'd better act quickly. The IRS just released a new report on the 400 taxpayers reporting the highest adjusted gross incomes (AGI) from 1992 to 2010. Of the 7,600 tax returns filed from 1992 to 2010 (400 highest earners in each year x 19 years), there were 4,024 unique, individual taxpayers. Of the group of 4,024 top earners from 1992-2010, there were 2,909 individuals taxpayers who made it into the “Fortunate 400″ only one time during the 19-year period. 

20% of Households Bear 100% of Net Tax Burden

We have already covered the fact that 20% of US households pay 94% of Federal income taxes. The Congressional Budget Office's latest report "The Distribution of Household Income and
Federal Taxes" provides new insight into how the burdens of taxation and the distribution of government payments fall. Mark Perry created this useful summary chart from that data. What it shows is that the entire net burden of the government taxation and redistribution machine falls on the 20% of households with the highest market income (roughly $80,000+ of Adjusted Gross Income) and that 60% of households are net recipients of government monies. But according to the President that top quintile of earners just isn't paying their "fair share".



Note: Transfer payments are payments and benefits from federal, state and local governments including Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance., Federal taxes paid by households include income, payroll, corporate, and excise taxes.