No Jeff, the bottom 80% should pay zero in income taxes, the top 20% should pay 100% of the income taxes

 Jeff Bezos says bottom half of earners should pay zero in income taxes

The top 20% receive income in excess of $10 trillion. Taxed at 50% that will still pay for the federal government.

They can live on $100k just like the rest of us, and still have half of everything above that left over. 

I stopped caring about this particular economic measure when I realized that it obscures the fact that the top 20% in this country receive 60% of the income it displays

Frankly, most of the economic charts produced by the government do this kind of thing.

Most of the time the rich use this data to tell you how well things are going, when what they really mean is how well it's going for them.

It's an aggregate measure, so that the vast sums earned by the rich distort higher what's actually happening to the majority. 

In the as-reported numbers at the time, everything actually went sideways for a time during the Great Recession and personal income actually fell, except that even that decline disappeared as the revisions to the data came in. The rich still made money in the Great Recession, enough to lift this aggregate measure ever higher right through the recession even as banks failed by the hundreds and millions lost their jobs and homes.

But the rich use this particular data set right now to tell you things like "you don't know how to shop" and "groceries have never been cheaper", you ignoramus.

They controlled roughly 60% of all income from 2020 to mid-2025, and the top 20% by wealth held nearly 72% of total household wealth as of Q4 2025. 

The top 20% received roughly $14 trillion of the $23 trillion in this chart in March 2026, leaving the remaining $9 trillion, 40%, to be split by the 80%, the rest of us, however we must.

Rising prices of anything will naturally impact the 20% far less than the 80%.

It's another "let them eat cake" moment.

 

 

The wealth inequality of today's K-shaped economy goes back to the Reagan Revolution

Wealth inequality and the ‘K-shaped’ economy are more striking than ever, data shows

 

They take vacations and buy luxury goods. You struggle to pay for food, shelter, and transportation.

 

K is not OK.

 

... A key measure of wealth concentration called the Gini coefficient sits at 60-year highs, according to a report from U.S. Bank published earlier this month. ... The net worth of America’s top 1% hit a record share of nearly 32% in the third quarter of 2025, the Federal Reserve reported. By comparison, the bottom 50% cumulatively held 2.5% of overall net wealth.

 

The portion of U.S. GDP heading to workers in the form of compensation tumbled to its lowest level in its more than 75-year history, per data tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means the average nonfarm business worker is seeing an increasingly small slice of an economy that has largely boomed over the last 15 years. ...

 

Total relative “outlays” — a broad measure of spending and nonmortgage payments — by U.S. consumers in the top 20% hit multidecade highs last year, a data analysis conducted by Moody’s Analytics found. The other 80% tumbled to new lows, the data shows. ...

 

While the “K-shape” term became popularized as an explanation for the uneven economic recovery seen during the pandemic, economists say the origins of this breakaway can be traced back decades earlier.

This type of diverging economy stems from the economic reorganization seen during the Reagan administration, according to Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at tax firm RSM. About two decades later, the structural break that created the K-shaped economy, as it’s now understood, was more clearly observed in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of the late 2000s, he said.

That was in part due to the loss of wealth tied to the historic housing market crash, Brusuelas said. On top of that, he said the jump in joblessness limited earnings potential for those without steady employment in their prime working years.

The Great Recession “created the conditions for the winner-take-all economy that emerged in its aftermath,” said Brusuelas, who first heard the K-shape term around 2008. “If you live, work and inhabit certain portions of the economy, you might as well live on the dark side of the moon compared to what goes on down-market.” ...

To make meaningful inroads, the U.S. would instead need to focus on tax reform and expanding social safety nets, according to RSM’s Brusuelas. ...

Populist taxes to match Trump's populist rhetoric

 The original personal exemption from the income tax was $3,000 in 1913. The equivalent of that in September 2025 is $97,440.

For married filing jointly the personal exemption was $4,000 in 1913. The equivalent of that in September 2025 is $129,920. 

This personal exemption, which Trump eliminated in 2018, should be reinstated, and indexed to inflation in this way from here on out, and this income should be entirely federal-tax-free, except of course for Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes, and state and local taxes.

About 83% of individual wage earners made $97k or less in 2023.

That's what actual populist taxation would look like.

Remember, the roughly top 20% would not pay taxes on their first $97k either, so they would be just like everybody else in respect of basic income. If they can't live on that, then neither can we.

Standard deductions and/or itemized deductions for the top 20% are for the debates over the rates they should pay progressively, and should be a moot point for the majority because the majority wouldn't be paying federal taxes anyway. 

Corporate income taxes and capital gains taxes muddy these waters, but those taxes were originally placed on Wall Street fat cats at a time when farmers all across this land faced punitive taxes on property which the Wall Streeters did not. Corporate income and capital gains taxes were meant to address that inequity.

The income tax was subsequently added, on the rich obviously, in part because those other taxes didn't really work to address the inequity. But now we have this Rube Goldberg machine of taxation which Trump has merely tweaked again but is not fundamentally reformed.

The fact is that today we still have horrible tax inequity where some income is more equal than others, with much lower tax rates on capital gains held more than one year.

This overwhelmingly benefits the top 20% by wealth, who own about 90% of the stock market's value*. The owners of this wealth routinely take their income from this source, not from W-2 income, but they are taxed at much lower long term capital gains tax rates of 0%, 15%, and 20%.

* the top 20% of households as measured by income own about 87% of directly-held equities

-- Michael Hiltzik, here 

Let's compare a person's taxes on next year's income of $97,000 under the Big Ugly Bill's ordinary income tax rates versus the capital gains tax rates.

Starting in 2026, a single filer will get a standard deduction of $16,100. If he makes $97,000 next year in ordinary income, his taxable income will be $80,900 and his federal income tax will be $12,510 ($5,800 plus 22% of the amount over $50,400). The effective tax rate is 12.89% on $97,000.

The same filer without W-2 income but with $97,000 of long term capital gains income instead comes out way ahead. His taxable income is the same because his standard deduction is the same: $80,900. However, on the first $49,450 of taxable income he pays 0% capital gains tax because he held it longer than one year. The remaining $31,450 is taxed at just 15%, which is $4,717.50. The effective tax rate is 4.86%, not 12.89%! That's 62% lower.

If we treated all income from every source the same way and taxed accordingly, the playing field would be more level.

If the people are taxed at ordinary income tax rates, arguably all entities should be. Corporations are people, they tell us, so there should be no story ever again about a profitable company escaping federal taxation in this country.

But Tesla and Meta, for example, paid no tax in 2023. About 25% of companies don't on average. 

As for individuals, the data about how many escape taxation is harder to come by, but an estimated 90,000 households making $200k or more in 2022 escaped taxation legally, and about 3,200 individuals making $1 million or more paid no federal tax.

There is nothing populist about a system which treats the income of rich people worthy of a privilege the income of the rest of us is not. 

Ronald Reagan July 3, 1983: Don't let anyone tell us that America's best days are behind her (but they are)

 The speech is here.

Unfortunately the numbers don't lie. Shortly after that speech, economic growth rolled over definitively. I think Reagan said what he said because serious people around him were telling him we were in big trouble (1982) and he didn't want to believe it. It was a denial of reality, similar to the denial of reality so typical today from Donald Trump.

 

Michael W. Green (@profplum99) describes in a recent essay in great detail many of the ways in which we are indeed poorer, especially people who have to live in New Jersey and work in New York, in his "My Life is a Lie" here.

The essay resonates mostly with people in the top 20%, which certainly doesn't include YT. But I found it very interesting, however, for how it starts off resting on the mistaken assumption that we have "healthy GDP growth". It is Green's unquestioned and fatal premise, no different than Reagan's or Trump's before him.

We do not have healthy GDP growth now, nor have we had it for a long time, at least not commensurate with a population which has grown by 106 million since 1984.

The compound annual growth rate for GDP from 1929 to 1984 was 6.869%, but through 2024 has fallen 26% to 5.079%.

"Well, that doesn't sound so bad", you say.

Well, the 5.079% rate has given us GDP of $29.3 trillion through 2024.

But at the 6.869% rate we would have GDP of $60.4 trillion, $31.1 trillion more than we do, more than twice as much again.

We have multiple new generations who expected the 1984 fairy tale who are now on the receiving end of 50% less than what might have been.

Solving this growth problem has been the number one aspiration of many on the right year in and year out, but no one has delivered on it.  The current pack are not conservatives. They've given up. They are simply hyenas, feasting off the flesh of the wounded, of whom there are more than ever.

The roll over of GDPA CAGR in 1981 was retested in 1984 (black line)

 

House GOP votes for tax breaks for rich Democrats from Blue states like New York, New Jersey, and California lol

 

House Republican tax bill passes ‘SALT’ deduction cap of $40,000. Here’s who benefits 

 

... Enacted via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or TCJA, of 2017, there’s currently a $10,000 limit on the SALT deduction, and raising that cap has been a priority for certain House lawmakers in high-tax states like New York, New Jersey and California. Filers must itemize deductions to claim the tax break for SALT.

If the House provision is enacted, the SALT cap would rise to $40,000, up from $30,000 in the previous plan, and phases out over $500,000, according to revised language released by the House Rules Committee. The provision would go into effect in 2025. ...

“Any changes to lift the cap would primarily benefit higher earners,” Garrett Watson, director of policy analysis at the Tax Foundation, wrote in an analysis on Tuesday.

With an income phaseout over $400,000, the top 20% of taxpayers “would be the only group to meaningfully benefit,” Watson wrote. ...

YOUR average hourly earnings are NOT up 2.9% as widely reported, for example by Larry Kudlow this weekend

Yes, average hourly earnings of TOTAL PRIVATE, seasonally adjusted, is up 2.9% year over year in January 2018.

Well, whoop dee do. Not seasonally adjusted it's up only 2.2%.

What to believe?

Average hourly earnings of TOTAL PRIVATE reports as much of the total universe of earnings as possible, but that's not the universe of 80% of American workers. It includes everybody, including the higher rollers in the top 20% whose big increases can skew the reported number dramatically. 

80% of American workers inhabit the world of production and nonsupervisory workers, whose average hourly earnings have always been tracked by the government going back to 1964.

Seasonally adjusted those earnings are up 2.4% year over year in January, but not seasonally adjusted BARELY 2%, a below average figure for the measure which is in keeping with what's been going on since 2008.

The little guy in this country has been getting crumbs from the masters' tables since 2008 when the routine increases averaging 3.4% before that went away. The new era averages a gain of 2.2% year over year, a cut of 35%.

The biggest gain in recent memory was 2.8% for January 2017, meaning most workers got their best increases since 2008 in 2016, not in 2017, and the 2% gain for 2017 means . . . THIS IS NOT A BOOM.

When the average worker starts getting ROUTINE year over year increases above 3% you'll know things are better.

They aren't.

It's time to treat the rich like equals: Dean Kalahar speaks up for proportional taxation

Here, although the ahistorical reading of Scripture by liberals on behalf of progressive taxation is hardly new:

Proportional taxes actually meet the equity and ability to pay principles of effective, efficient, and "fair" taxes. With a proportional tax everyone pays the same percentage but those who earn or spend more pay more. For example: if you buy a $50,000 car and the Fair/proportional tax is 10%, then you pay $5,000 in tax. If, on the other hand, you buy a $5,000 car, your tax is $500. By paying the same percentage, everyone is offered the dignity of being treated equally, and those who afford more pay more. Isn't that what liberals are always demanding?

"We have to raise the progressive tax rate so the "rich" pay their "fair share."

In reality, progressive tax rates, like the federal income tax, might meet the ability to pay principle but not the equity principle. Progressive taxes have varied tax rate percentages depending on income so taxpayers are not treated equally. Currently the top 20% of income earners pay more than 90% of the income taxes, while the bottom 50% pays less than 3% of the income taxes. Who's actually "paying their fair share?"

Rush Limbaugh Today Totally Botches Income Quintiles On The Program

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

The relevant passage is here:

Poverty is expressed as an income level. Most economists break down income in America to five brackets, called quintiles, and people move in and out of these. The top quintile, I think, is like a million plus, and that'd be the top 1% of 1%. I forgot what the breakdown is, but the poverty level, it's roughly, what, $14,000 for a family of four? It's around there. People move in and out of these all the time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is rich.

A quintile in this instance is one of any of the five groups of American households divided into those five groups based on how much money they make.

By definition, then, the top quintile is the richest 20% of households in America. So it's impossible for the top quintile to be "the top 1%", let alone "the top 1% of 1%".

As embarrassing as that is, Rush has absolutely no concept what it means to reach the top 20% of household income in this country.

The fact is it doesn't take all that much, and certainly nothing close to $1 million, hard as it may be to get there.

Currently the point in the middle of the top 20% of households by income is only about $181,905 per annum. That means about half the people in the top quintile make more than that, and about half make less. And interestingly enough, the middle of the richest 5% of households in this country isn't anywhere close to $1 million, either. The average household income of the top 5% is just $318,052. (For a good presentation of the data, see here.)

And Rush is equally out of touch about what it means to be poor. The federal definition for a family of four is about $23,500, not $14,000. The latter is about what it means for just one person to be poor, not four (see here).

Rush Limbaugh complains constantly about the sorry state of public education in this country. He even did so today in the same segment:

[L]ook at [President] Johnson's solutions. Education, job training, medical care, housing. That hasn't changed. The same weapons, the same language, the same way they tug at heartstrings. It's 1964, and they keep using the same lingo, obviously because it works. But look at how our education system's been since 1964 with them in charge.

Yep. Look at how it's been.

Rush is Exhibit A . . . the most popular radio host ever for a reason.

The Growth In Income Inequality Wasn't A Bug, It Was A Feature Invented By Liberalism

If you generally tax some income at one rate and other income at a lower one, what do you think would happen over a long period of time?

Obviously you would see income shift to the category taxed at the lower rate, to the extent that this is possible for those earning it.

This is what has happened with income from capital gains, the tax rate on which has been much lower by law than the tax rates paid on ordinary income.

That's the long-term lesson from the data, the salience of which seems to elude Bruce Bartlett writing for The New York Times:

For most people, income is simple: it means wages or perhaps a pension or Social Security benefits. Income from capital – dividends, interest, rent and capital gains – seldom enters into the calculation. The vast bulk of such income is earned by the ultrawealthy, like Mr. Romney.

According to the Tax Policy Center, in 2011 those in the middle of income distribution got about 70 percent of their income from labor and only about 3 percent from capital. By contrast, those in the top 1 percent of income distribution got 30 percent of their income from labor and 35 percent from capital.

The disparity is even more pronounced when one looks at the distribution of aggregate capital income. The total came to $1.1 trillion last year. Of this, 86 percent was earned by those in the top 20 percent of households, ranked by income. But this figure is misleading, because within the top quintile, the vast bulk of capital income went only to those at the very top. ...

[T]he tax code makes a sharp distinction between income from labor and income from capital. Wages are fully taxed at rates as high as 35 percent by the income tax, plus taxes for Social Security and Medicare. In contrast, realized capital gains and dividends on corporate stock are taxed at a maximum rate of 15 percent and do not bear any taxes for Social Security or Medicare.

Income inequality in America has grown precisely for this reason, and it is an artifact of progressivism, and of liberalism generally.

The contemporary distinction between capital gains and ordinary gains got much of its impetus under FDR, when the modern tax code differentiated for the first time between capital gains held for 1, 2, 5 and 10 years, exempting from taxation 20 percent of gains, 40 percent, 60 percent and 70 percent, for the respective holding periods. Considering how steep and confiscatory marginal tax rates became after 1916, the provisions under FDR look like a bone thrown to the rich. What these reforms did, however, was cement the trend toward tax avoidance for the rich which had been introduced earlier.

Originally capital gains had been taxed as ordinary income up to a rate of 7 percent, which was the top marginal income tax rate for the first three years of the modern income tax. But as marginal tax rates on ordinary income skyrocketed after 1916, the low 7 percent capital gains rate continued to apply until 1921, after which the rate was 12.5 percent, regardless of holding period and despite the fact that marginal income tax rates soared to 63 percent and higher as the years marched on.

So from the very beginning the rich were given their privileges in tax avoidance by making distinctions between income while the broad mass of the people got soaked with income taxes on their ordinary income. The steeply progressive rates made it appear that the rich were paying their fair share when in effect they had recourse to a back door to ameliorate their condition through the capital gains code provisions. Liberalism was nothing if not hypocritical. 

If our tax policy goal today is to reduce income inequality, as seems to be the prevailing notion among liberal and liberal-leaning commentators, we ought to reconsider that history and appreciate better how tax policy is often just pushing on a string. To a conservative what leaps to mind is making taxes on ordinary income look more like taxes on capital gains income by flattening rates, not the other way around, raising capital gains rates to look more like progressive income tax rates, and broadening the base up the scale by capturing all income of all kinds for Social Security and Medicare before considering broadening the base down the scale by abolishing tax loss expenditures like the mortgage interest deduction. 

Income inequality begins with treating some forms of income differently than others for tax purposes. There may be important social and economic reasons for doing so, such as promoting family formation or capital investment, but it should never be forgotten that you will immediately be introducing inequality into the equation when you do. How you compensate for that is what matters in approximating a just society. 

The Increase in the Wealth Gap is Due to the Housing Collapse

The latest figures from the Federal Reserve (link: compare lines 4 and 42) show that enormous wealth destruction in housing is the overwhelming cause of the dramatic decline in household net worth between 2006 and 2011.

Of the $7.8 trillion decline in net worth over that period, $6.6 trillion of that is all from the bursting of the housing bubble . . . nearly 85 percent.

Hurt most by this are the millions of middle class Americans whose primary asset is their home. Desperately trying to hold on to what they have, by scrimping, saving and working, they don't have the luxury of time to occupy much of anything to protest what is happening to them.

It is impolitic to say so, but their plight is the frequent one of the undiversified investor: too many eggs in one basket.

But that's not a bug, it's a feature of entering the middle class, whose goal is owning a home and raising a family in it, not sophisticated money management and investing. Such people who can scrape together the income of $40,000 to $50,000 necessary to support home ownership typically aren't going to have significant financial assets to manage. Of the 150 million wage earners in America, after all, fully 99 million make $40,000 a year or less.

Neither Obama nor the Republican candidates for president, nor Occupy Wall Street or the Tea Party for that matter, seem to talk much about any of this, yet the collapse of housing better explains the growing gap between rich and poor in America than do the supposed crimes of the one percent. The rich may be getting richer, but it's inspite of the fact that their own homes have declined in value, too. The middle class is being squeezed downward because its primary asset continues to lose value.

The deep frustration of so many of the American people with their elected leaders is that the leaders really don't represent them in this matter, in the same sense that sympathizing with, understanding, or trying to fix this problem doesn't have the urgency for them anymore than it does for the rich. The reason is that virtually none of them has personal experience of it. From our president to our senators and all the way on down to our representatives, we have leaders whose own high net worth and the insulation from our vulnerabilities that that affords make them remote, unfeeling, and unmotivated.

In point of fact, since it was Democrats and Republicans who conspired in the very policies which have misled Americans to drain $10 trillion in home equity over three decades (for example, dramatic changes to tax and banking policy in 1997 and 1999 under Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich and Phil Gramm), it shouldn't be surprising that none of them really wants to talk about this gorilla in the living room. They helped make and sell the bed we're now sleeping in. And we bought it.

Of about 132 million total dwellings in 2010 of all types (table 3), just 61 million occupied dwellings are single family homes occupied by their owners, with an additional 11 million occupied by renters, according to the latest Census data here (link). That means something substantially less than 46 percent of total dwellings in the country could plausibly represent the American dream of the traditional middle class. The richest quintile, those households making over $100,000 per year, let it be remembered, lives in houses, too.

The Economic Policy Institute, whose president is a socialist, here (link) provides a useful summary of how wealthier individuals avoided the severity of the housing decline precisely because more of their assets were diversified and were not all riding on real estate (emphases added):

In 2007—prior to the Great Recession—median net worth was $106,000 (consisting primarily of home equity, as discussed later). ... Net worth for the top 1% was $19.2 million in 2007 . . ..

The updated figures for 2009 reflect the enormous destruction of wealth due to the bursting of the housing bubble. As a general rule, households with less wealth have a greater share of their wealth embedded in their homes. Thus, it is not surprising that the fallout from the deflating housing bubble disproportionally affected them. On average, the top 20% lost 16.0% and the bottom 80% lost 25.1% of their total wealth in 2008 and 2009. Average wealth of the bottom 80% was just $62,900 in 2009—a dropoff of $40,900 from 2007 and slightly less, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it was more than a quarter-century ago in 1983. Those at the top also lost ground but not nearly as much, percentage-wise. Average wealth of the top 1% was close to $14 million in 2009, down $5.2 million from 2007. ...

[H]ousing equity is a far more important form of wealth for most households. ... In 2007, the middle 20% of households held $196,700 in non-stock assets, and only $10,200 in stocks. In other words, non-stock assets—which are over-whelmingly housing equity—made up about 95% of this group’s wealth.

In the United States homeownership has long been associated with solid footing on the economic ladder, and yet the housing crash has meant that for a broad swath of people homeownership is no longer a reality.

The stepping stone from the lower and working classes to the upper classes, obviously, is the middle class. Very few skip that step, on the way up or on the way down. Rags to riches and back to rags again is interesting, but not common. Rich liberals from both parties, however, have a vested interest in minimizing the middle class to polarize the country. Rich Republicans and Democrats alike don't want the competition entrepreneurial Americans threaten them with, and leftist Democrats need a servile, manipulable constituency they can feed table scraps to in order to keep themselves in power. Some so-called conservative Republicans also, it must be said, seek their own fiefdoms of influence and power at the expense of impulses to limited government. George W. Bush's play for senior votes with Medicare Part D comes to mind.

What middle Americans should demand is a bigger House of Representatives to co-opt these entrenched interests by de-concentrating the power which the 435 now enjoy. Tea Partiers in particular should be advocating a return to the constitutional principle of one representative for every thirty-thousand of population, if their protestations to originalism mean anything. Instead of the bloated, rich and corrupt 435 politicians we've been stuck with for a hundred years, we should have 10,000 lean citizen legislators.

When we get them, things will begin to change for the better because our representatives will have far less power and far more reason to listen to the people. Special interests will have much less influence over them, campaigns will be far less costly, and Congressional staffs could be reduced dramatically, saving us money and getting some actual work out of our politicians for a change. The move would also take away the enthusiasm for radical proposals such as the elimination of the electoral college by dramatically expanding the pool of electors in presidential elections.

We might even persuade such a House to overturn the 17th Amendment, another blow for originalism, which would help improve the US Senate almost overnight. By returning the corrupting influences of campaign cash to state houses where senators would be appointed, we might actually be able to do something about corruption more often because it would be closer to home and we'd be more aware of it.

Bill Clinton's Middle Class Tax Increase Meant the Rich Got a Bigger Piece of the Pie

Mark Perry seems to have missed a good story.

He's been talking recently about how the income share of the top 20 percent has been FLAT since 1994, as shown here.

What's more interesting, however, is the oddity that his charts show that the income share of the top 20 percent experienced a pronounced spike up between 1992 and 1994, which includes the first two years of the Bill Clinton administration.

Why did the richer get a bigger share of the income pie after Bill Clinton raised taxes on them in 1993?

Top marginal income tax rates had declined from 38.5 percent in 1987 to 28 percent in 1988, as shown here, and in 1991 another higher rate of 31 percent was added under Bush 41. But under Clinton in 1993 an additional marginal rate of 39.6 percent was added with the help of the Democrat controlled Congress. So higher marginal income tax rates prevailed, but the richer nevertheless got a bigger share of the income.

That doesn't make any sense. How did that happen?

The answer is Clinton's middle class tax increases.

For one thing, the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes was raised. That bumped up the limit on incomes on which the tax was levied. A tax increase for all wage earners. For another thing, the cap on income subject to Medicare taxes was removed. That meant no ordinary income could escape the tax any longer. Another huge tax increase. And thirdly, Social Security income beyond 50 percent up to 85 percent became subject to income taxation. Anyone taking Social Security income felt this, not just the rich. Another huge tax increase.

These were massive tax increases on wage earners, as opposed to those richer Americans who could take their income differently if need be, often in the form of capital gains, or from tax-free municipal bonds, or from tax shelters.

The net effect of the Clinton tax increase was that just about everyone in the four quintiles below the top 20 percent lost ground on income, which meant that the rich appeared to spike up in their share of the income pie. The regimentation in law of the tax increases on everyone altered and froze the aggregate shares of the income pie going forward, hence the flatness of those charts since 1994.

The truth was that Clinton's tax increase on the richer, who ended up shifting income to avoid taxation, masked a massive tax increase on everyone else, who couldn't shift their income if they wanted to, and they've experienced a smaller bite of the income pie ever since.

That's what expanding the tax base in tandem with raising rates will do.

Republicans, take note.

Doh! We Tax the Rich Because That's Where The Money Is, Knucklehead.

Per Census.gov here, these are the income limits by each quintile of 23,507.6 households in 2009:

Lowest: up to $20,453

Second: up to $38,550

Third:    up to $61,801

Fourth:up to $100,000

Fifth:            $100,000+.

That means 80 percent of the country, about 94,030 households, makes $100,000 per year or less.

We know from IRS data that earners reporting adjusted gross incomes of approximately $67,000 or less in 2008, totaling $2.8 trillion in AGI, represented 105 million tax returns out of 140 million total. They are the bottom 75 percent of tax returns in the country, a rough proxy for the first 4 of the 5 income quintiles.

Using back of the envelope estimates, perhaps another 7 million more tax returns represent the rest of the territory up to $100,000, and AGI of another $0.6 trillion, meaning that the first 4/5 of the country contributes AGI of about $3.4 trillion.

Roughly 28 million tax returns would then round out the top quintile, with AGI of approximately $5 trillion. It is certain that 14.4 million of these returns account for $3.9 trillion of AGI, the top 10 percent of earners.

Thus one can estimate that tax returns from the top quintile have something like 6 times the AGI per return compared with the returns of all the quintiles below them taken together.

About 80 percent of the earners have 40 percent of the income, while the top 20 percent of the earners have 60 percent of the income.

That's where the money is.

The Wall Street Journal's Deliberately Misleading Middle Class Tax Target Graph

The graph above is the subject of a deliberately misleading story in The Wall Street Journal, here.

The graph makes it look like there's a pretty healthy middle in America, and that the population falls more or less neatly into a bell curve.

The truth, however, is otherwise: 4/5ths of the households in America have total income below $100K per year. The whole right half of the graph, in other words everyone at $100K-$200K and up, represents only the top 20 percent of the households, otherwise known as the fifth income quintile.

The people in the middle of this graph are in the upper middle class and the lower upper class, not in the middle class as The Journal states. And the single biggest pile of money is in the hands of the lower upper class, which doth protest too much of its modest circumstances.

The true middle in America is the 20 percent of the population making roughly $38K to $62, and this article doesn't speak for them anymore than Obama does, who fancies that rich in America only starts at $250K. It doesn't. It starts at $100K. And that's a shame. We should have done better than that by now.

4 of 6 Current Tax Rates Already Do Not Apply to 80% of the Country

Per the US Census, all US households divide into five groups of equal size along these income lines for 2009:

1) $0 to $20,453

2) $20,454 to $38,550

3) $38,551 to $61, 801

4) $61,802 to $100,000

5) over $100,000 (the top 5% make in excess of $180,000).

Current tax brackets are concentrated on the fifth group, the over $100,000 set, so that the top four of the six brackets affect the top 20% of earners in the population the most:

10% for adjusted gross incomes $0 to $16,750

15% on AGIs to $68,000

25% on AGIs to $137,300

28% on AGIs to $209,250

33% on AGIs to $373,650

35% on AGIs above $373,650.

The result is that 60% of the country is responsible for very little tax revenue, and the expansion of various credits like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Credit have meant that an increasingly large percentage of the population is paying no tax at all.

For the 2008 tax year the Tax Foundation reported here that 36% of filers paid no tax at all:

Nonpaying status used to be a sure sign of poverty or near-poverty, but Congress and the President have changed the tax laws to pull much of the middle class into the growing pool of nonpayers. The income level at which a typical family of four will owe no income taxes has risen rapidly, now topping $51,000. 

As a result, recently released IRS data for the 2008 tax year show that a record 51.6 million filers had no income tax obligation. That means more than 36 percent of all Americans who filed a tax return for 2008 were nonpayers, raising serious doubts about the ability of the income tax system to continue funding the federal government's ballooning expenditures. 

The situation worsened dramatically in 2009, to 47%, according to the Tax Policy Center in this AP story: 

About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That's according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization. ...The bottom 40 percent, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. For those people, the government sends them a payment.

"We have 50 percent of people who are getting something for nothing," said Curtis Dubay, senior tax policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. ...The number of households that don't pay federal income taxes increased substantially in 2008, when the poor economy reduced incomes and Congress cut taxes in an attempt to help recovery. 

In 2007, about 38 percent of households paid no federal income tax, a figure that jumped to 49 percent in 2008, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center. 

In other words, the tax code under George Bush and the Republicans in 2001 and 2003 became an instrument of liberal social policy, providing massive social spending on America's middle and lower classes. Combined with George Bush's massive hand out to the elderly in the form of drugs for seniors you now understand why liberals hate George Bush so much: because he out-liberaled the liberals. 

And don't expect to hear about it from Rush Limbaugh. He thinks there isn't anyone in the country who is undertaxed. 

If there were really any conservatives left in the country, they'd be calling for a complete end to these subsidies because they represent government spending which we cannot afford, and for a broader tax base which embodied every American's patriotic duty to contribute to the general welfare. 

A real conservative would equate exempting low incomes from taxation with the practice of exempting high incomes from taxation. The "refund" checks which "the poor" receive from the government when they file their taxes are no different from the exemption the rich receive when payroll taxes are not collected on income above $106,500. The former are justified as offsets of the payroll taxes the poor pay, the latter as exemptions from contributions the rich would never live to recoup. Everyone in a narrower and narrower middle pays and pays those taxes, year in and year out, to benefit the poor and the elderly. It is unsustainable.