{"id":993,"date":"2015-11-28T12:49:22","date_gmt":"2015-11-28T18:49:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/therichdontpaytax.com\/blog\/?p=993"},"modified":"2015-11-28T14:14:14","modified_gmt":"2015-11-28T20:14:14","slug":"who-says-the-rich-dont-pay-tax-according-to-irs-they-pay-double-their-share","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/therichdontpaytax.com\/blog\/who-says-the-rich-dont-pay-tax-according-to-irs-they-pay-double-their-share\/","title":{"rendered":"Who says the rich don’t pay tax? According to IRS, they pay double their share."},"content":{"rendered":"

The top 1% of taxpayers pay 38% of all individual income tax and that’s double their share of all income earned in the USA.<\/h3>\n

The top economic 25% of Americans pay 97% of all individual income tax collected.<\/h3>\n

The latest annual release of IRS Collections Data is available\u00a0and it shows that, far from what you hear from the legacy media, not only do the rich pay tax, but they pay double their share, based on their share of all individual income earned in the United States. The most recent data covers tax years 2001 through 2013 and a summary of the 2013 data can be found on our annual IRS\u00a0Data Update page<\/a>. On that page, you can also find links to the IRS website, where you can download the complete IRS spreadsheets, from which this data was derived. (Yes. That’s 2013 data. The IRS gives us till April 15 to close our books and pay our taxes, but it takes them almost two years\u00a0to close their books. Go figure.)<\/p>\n

Before anyone\u00a0makes an incorrect assumption about tax breaks for the rich affecting these numbers, it’s important to note that the numbers in this\u00a0IRS data represent actual “collections”<\/strong>.\u00a0It’s money deposited in the U.S. Treasury. These numbers are totals, after<\/strong> all adjustments, deductions, exemptions, credits, and even after the effects of cheating. It’s what was ultimately paid<\/strong>\u00a0by each income group.<\/p>\n

There is one more thing that we need to consider, before looking at this data. Think back to\u00a0when Mitt Romney claimed that 47% of Americans don’t pay tax, but he couldn’t cite a source for that number. Well, it turns out that Romney was wrong\u2026 but not in the way the media tried to paint the issue. It turns out that his number was low. Data from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) reveals that, in fact,\u00a051% of Americans don’t pay tax<\/strong>. Their actual words were,\u00a0“\u2026\u00a0approximately 22 percent of all tax units, including fliers and non fliers, will have zero income tax liability, approximately 30 percent will receive a refundable credit, and approximately\u00a049 percent will have a positive income tax liability<\/strong>.”<\/em>\u00a0For the record,\u00a0“tax units”<\/em>\u00a0are roughly equivalent to\u00a0“households”<\/em>.\u00a0To download the original Joint Committee on Taxation\u00a0PDF document, from the U.S. Senate website, click\u00a0here<\/a>. Then look near\u00a0the bottom of the first page, to see just how many Americans\u00a0don’t pay tax.<\/p>\n

This means that the top 50% of taxpayers is really only the top economic 24.5% of Americans. For our purposes, we’ll round this number to 25%. It also means that the top 1% of taxpayers is really only the top economic 0.49% of Americans. We’ll round this to 1\/2%. So, in the table below, considering that roughly half of Americans don’t pay any income tax, the percentile of taxpayers (taken from the IRS Collections Data) is dimmed, while the calculated percentile of all Americans is bolded, in order to emphasize that the percentile of all Americans is the more important number.<\/p>\n

Here are just a few of the things that the new data shows us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Taxpayers<\/span><\/td>\nAmericans<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Top 50%<\/span><\/td>\nTop 25%<\/strong><\/td>\n97.21%<\/td>\nPercent of all individual income tax actually collected<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Top 1%<\/span><\/td>\nTop 1\/2%<\/strong><\/td>\n37.8%<\/td>\nPercent of all individual income tax actually collected<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
19.04%<\/td>\nPercent of all individual income earned in the USA<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
27.08%<\/td>\nAverage tax rate<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Bottom 50%<\/span><\/td>\nSecond
\nRichest
\nQuarter<\/strong><\/td>\n		2.79%<\/td>\nPercent of all individual income tax actually collected<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
11.49%<\/td>\nPercent of all individual income earned in the USA<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
3.3%<\/td>\nAverage tax rate<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

From the above, we can make the following calculations.<\/p>\n