By Scott Hodge During my recent testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, I cited an OECD statistic that the U.S. has the most progressive income tax system among industrialized nations.[1] This prompted one Senator to point out that if the richest 10% of taxpayers earn the most of any OECD country, shouldn't it make sense that they bear the largest tax burden of any country? The answer can be found in the OECD table below. This table shows the share of taxes paid by the richest 10 percent of households, the share of all market income earned by that group, and the ratio of what that 10 percent of households pays in taxes versus what they earn as a share of the nation's income. The first column shows that the top 10 percent of households in the U.S. pays 45.1 percent of all income taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) in the country. Italy is the only other country in which the top 10 percent of households pays more than 40 percent of the income tax burden (42.2%). Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top decile of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent. By contrast, column #2 shows that the richest decile in America earned 33.5 percent of the market income in the country in 2005 - the year in which this snapshot was taken, but little has changed since then. But, a few other countries do have a greater or similar concentration of income as does the U.S. For example, the OECD table shows that the wealthiest decile of households in Italy and Poland earn a greater share of their country's market income than do our "rich" - 35.8 percent and 33.9 percent respectively - while the share of income earned by the top decile of households in the U.K. is about on par with those in the U.S. at 32.3 percent..... http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/27134.html
No one paid those rates, so the argument is irrelevant and misleading. It's interesting and instructive to see how liberals approach this issue. It is never along the lines of "how do we fund the government in the most economically efficient manner" or "how do we structure taxes to do the least damage to the economy." Rather, it is how can we demagogue the issue most effectively? 40 some percent of the country does not pay income taxes, yet our socialist in chief has the audacity to go before the congress and say the top ten percent are not paying their "fair" share.
Contrary to your leftist propaganda, what matters is the share of total taxes people pay, NOT the rates. And this shows that trend is exactly opposite to your red herring BS.