Taxes: how much is enough ?

How Much Do the Top 1 Percent Pay of All Taxes?

by Curtis Dubay


Ever since President Obama started running for president in 2007, there has been a debate about how much tax rich Americans pay and whether they should pay more.

In that ongoing debate, Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias criticized the chart below because, according to them, it does not give a complete picture of the tax burden borne by Americans because it only includes the federal income tax.



Since the rich pay a higher share of federal income taxes than of total federal taxes, they argued we were misleading by making it look like the rich pay a higher share of taxes than they do.


We responded to them here and here.

In those responses, we showed we weren’t being misleading because we make plain the chart includes only federal income tax. Furthermore, examining the federal income tax makes sense because President Obama has long wanted to raise it on the rich.

We also agreed that it made sense to look at the total federal tax burden, in addition to federal income taxes, to offer additional context to the debate.

In that spirit, here is a new chart that shows the burden of all federal taxes, including individual income, corporate income, payroll, excise and other miscellaneous taxes:



It still shows the same story: Top earners pay a disproportionately large share of the federal tax burden.

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