The Total Taxes People Pay

One of the biggest focuses of political debate is how much taxes people should pay relative to each other in different income brackets and if either the poor or the rich are paying "their fair share". If you just listen to liberal pundits, you may imagine the wealthy are all paying half the taxes the rest of us are. If you just listen to conservative pundits, you might think that the wealthy are paying at least 50% in taxes and almost everyone else pays nothing. That's because a lot of people choose to talk about only specific situations in specific areas of our tax code, not the overall picture. For instance, there's been a lot of talk lately about how around half of Americans pay no federal income taxes. It's true, but people get misled because they think of that as all our taxes, or at least as all the taxes that are deducted from your paycheck, which isn't the case.

So here's an interesting graph on how much the average person in various income groups pays, as a percentage of their income, in total taxes:

It's much more evenly distributed than most would probably guess.


* found this from Wonkblog.