Chip Bok's Bokbluster

President Trump introduced his tax reform plan last week. Critics in the media labeled it “tax cuts for the rich.”

But there’s a reason for that. The rich pay most of the federal income tax.

Democrats are running against income inequality. And they’ve got a point. According to the Tax Foundation the top one percent earn twenty percent of all the income in America..

But they also pay forty percent of all the federal income taxes in the country.

Taxpayer

Half the working population can’t protest against Washington by demanding “I’m a taxpayer and ..!” That’s because they don’t pay federal income taxes. Though they do pay social security and medicare taxes.

Here’s a link to a Tax Foundation chart breaking down who pays what by percentile:

The data demonstrates that the U.S. individual income tax continues to be very progressive, borne mainly by the highest income earners.

• In 2014, 139.6 million taxpayers reported earning $9.71 trillion in adjusted gross income and paid $1.37 trillion in individual income taxes.
• The share of income earned by the top 1 percent of taxpayers rose to 20.6 percent in 2014. Their share of federal individual income taxes also rose, to 39.5 percent.
• In 2014, the top 50 percent of all taxpayers paid 97.3 percent of all individual income taxes while the bottom 50 percent paid the remaining 2.7 percent.
• The top 1 percent paid a greater share of individual income taxes (39.5 percent) than the bottom 90 percent combined (29.1 percent).
• The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid a 27.1 percent individual income tax rate, which is more than seven times higher than taxpayers in the bottom 50 percent (3.5 percent).