Erick Erickson has come under attack from Annie Lowrey, Lee Fang, and Jonathan Chait for his We are the 53 percent response to the We are the 99 percent tumblr advocating for higher taxes.
Fang’s post consists of nothing more than snide personal attacks on Erickson, which Erick responds to here. Lowrey has a customarily classier response, noting:
OK … but what percentage of all federal taxes do the rich and poor pay? How much of all income do they make? Chait attempts to answer this question with a dubious study from the Center for Tax Justice purporting to show that the highest-earning 1 percent take home 20 percent of the national income and pay 21 percent of the total taxes. The CTJ study is based on a model which claims to factor in all state and local taxes in addition to federal ones.
His use of these numbers in a debate over federal taxes is highly misleading. Fortunately, the CBO has produced numbers on income shares and taxes paid at the federal level. Again these numbers include all federal taxes, not just income taxes, including payroll taxes.
According to the CBO, the top 1 percent earned 19.4 percent of all income and paid 28.1 percent of all federal taxes. The top 20 percent of all earners earned 56 percent of all income and paid 69 percent of all federal taxes. Meanwhile, the bottom 20 percent earned 4 percent of all income and paid less than one percent of all federal taxes.
As the chart above shows, the highest 20 percent of earners are the only quintile to pay a greater share in taxes than they take in income.
