No taxes PAID - 6 of the top 400. "Top 400" means more than $200 MILLION

[underpants]

The annual report, which the IRS typically releases with a two-year delay, covers the 400 tax returns reporting the highest incomes in 2009. These families reported an average income of $202.4 million, down for the second year as the Great Recession slashed their capital gains.

In addition to the six who paid no tax, another 110 families paid 15 percent or less in federal income taxes. That’s the same federal tax rate as a single worker who made $61,500 in 2009.

Overall, the top 400 paid an average income tax rate of 19.9 percent, the same rate paid by a single worker who made $110,000 in 2009. The top 400 earned five times that much every day.




http://www.nationalmemo.com/david-cay-johnston-the-fortunate-400/



According to data from the Internal Revenue Service, one in 189 high income Americans paid no federal income taxes in 2009. This included households making more than $200 million. As this chart by Noni Mausa at Angry Bear shows, the number of wealthy taxpayers managing to avoid the income tax spiked after 2004, while the percentage increased “eightfold

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/06/07/496055/wealthy-taxpayers-chart-income/

[fascisthunter]

1. we the people owe them a bag full of shit

that's about all.... maybe a guillotine actually.

[dkf]

2. All it takes is owning no investments other than muni bonds.

If you don't think that it is important that municipalities have access to lower interest rates then you should start taxing it all.

[dems_rightnow]

8. Not so

The graph compares AGI to effective tax rate.

Municipal income is EXCLUDED from AGI. If all you had were municipal bonds for income, you'd fall into a low earner category, not a high earner.

[slackmaster]

3. How much did they pay in capital gains and other taxes?

Incomplete picture is incomplete. A lot of people at the top get most of their money in forms other than earned income.

[TBF]

9. Not nearly as much as they should if we are talking capital gains -

that rate has been slashed in half (by both repug and dem presidents) since Reagan took office.

[NYC_SKP]

4. K/R This graphic needs to be saved to the DU activist resources folder....

eom

[Igel]

5. How odd.

I keep hearing how the amount I pay, at 35%, is so much more than the amount that somebody like Buffett pays, at 15%.

Yet this says my tax bracket pays considerably less than 15%.

Remarkably, this chart agrees fairly well with my 1040s. I always suspected I wasn't this ultra-exception to the rule. And that the others were knowingly misrepresenting as true facts that they knew to be incorrect so as to cause me to believe something untrue.

[ctaylors6]

6. marginal vs effective tax rates

When you hear that you're paying 35%, that's the highest marginal rate. And of course that's on taxable income, which is almost always lower than AGI, which the chart shows. (And I'm assuming that effective tax rate here = fed income taxes owed divided by AGI.)

I really think the top 400 must be largely earning income through investments, and therefore are benefitting from either the LT cap gains rate or from tax-free investments. The IRS chart linked in the linked article shows the AGI cutoff each year for several years for the filers with the top 400 AGIs. The AGI cutoff for the 400 is quite correlated to stock market each year.

[Sirveri]

7. tax brackets are progressive, so the effective rate is less than the posted rate.

Basically your first 15k is tax free, then 15% for the next 30k then 25% for the next 50k then 25% on everything past that. Except for capital gains, those numbers aren't exact, they're examples. But it means that if you made 30k/yr you'd pay 2,250$ which is a tax rate of 7.5%.

That said, these guys are making about 550k a day,but since it primarily comes from capital gains it only is taxed at 15% because it's not treated as income. The argument for this is that those investments lose value over time because of inflation. However the fix to that is to simply allow a deduction for inflation (base it on C-CPI-U and that number will always be a good one).