The Federal Government's Job Is Not to Redistribute Income | The Weekly Standard

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent claims to debunk the conservative argument against raising taxes on wealthier Americans, by drawing attention to “how much the share of their own income they are paying in taxes” and observing how much that share “has shrunk” (italics in original). But the facts don’t back him up.


Sargent claims that, from 1986 to 2008, the share of income that the top 1 percent of American income-earners paid in federal taxes dropped from 33 to 23 percent. But the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says that the percentage actually rose from 25.5 to 29.5 percent from 1986 to 2007 (the last year for which the CBO provides such figures). And according to the left-leaning Tax Policy Center, the share of income that the top 1 percent paid in federal taxes in 2008 was 30 percent. So wealthier Americans are not only paying a higher share of federal taxes — the top 0.1 percent now pays more in federal income tax than the bottom 80 percent — but the share of their own income that they are paying in federal taxes has risen as well. 




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