"Fair Share" of Taxes

Similar to prior years, the 'rich aren't paying their fair share' argument becomes more difficult when facts are introduced: 

• Top .1% of earners contribute 20% of all federal income taxes
• Top 1% of earners contribute 44% of all federal income taxes
• Top 20% of earners contribute 87% of all federal incomes taxes
• Previous articles also note that the % of income taxes paid by these groups also exceed their portion of total income (Top 1% take in x% of all income but pay more than x% of all taxes)
• 45% of all households pay $0 in federal income taxes

A few follow up questions:

• Given the data above, how do Democrats justify the 'Fair Share' argument?
• When will they be defining 'fair share'?  At the moment, it seems indistinguishable from 'more'
• When will republicans fight back against this ridiculous statement?  If anything, 'fairness' would call for increased contributions from less wealthy Americans...

45 percent of Americans pay no federal income tax







Many Americans don’t have to worry about giving Uncle Sam part of their hard-earned cash for their income taxes this year.

An estimated 45.3 percent of American households — roughly 77.5 million — will pay no federal individual income tax, according to data for the 2015 tax year from the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan Washington-based research group. (Note that this does not necessarily mean they won’t owe their states income tax.)

Roughly half pay no federal income tax because they have no taxable income, and the other roughly half get enough tax breaks to erase their tax liability, explains Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center.

Despite the fact that rich people paying little in the way of income taxes makes plenty of headlines, this is the exception to the rule: The top 1 percent of taxpayers pay a higher effective income tax rate than any other group (around 23 percent, according to a report released by the Tax Policy Center in 2014) — nearly seven times higher than those in the bottom 50 percent.

On average, those in the bottom 40 percent of the income spectrum end up getting money from the government. Meanwhile, the richest 20 percent of Americans, by far, pay the most in income taxes, forking over nearly 87 percent of all the income tax collected by Uncle Sam.

The top 1 percent of Americans, who have an average income of more than $2.1 million, pay 43.6 percent of all the federal individual income tax in the US; the top 0.1 percent — just 115,000 households, whose average income is more than $9.4 million — pay more than 20 percent of it.

When it comes to all federal taxes — individual income, payroll, excise, corporate income and estate taxes — the distributions of who pays what is more spread out. This is partially because nearly everyone pays excise taxes, which include taxes on gasoline, alcohol and cigarettes.