Can someone tell me the total % that the average person making over $1million a year pays ?

[Bombtrack]

in the United States ? Federal, state, and local combined percentage of their income when living in a given major metro area (LA, New York, etc).

After 7 years of tax cuts for the rich the rich pundits still never altered their complaint about giving "half their money to the government every year".

[lumberjack_jeff]

1. Citizens for Tax Justice studied this question

In Washington, in 1995, they found that those in the top 1% of income (average income $717,000) paid 3.6% of their income in state taxes. This compares to 17% for those in the lowest 20%.

http://www.ctj.org/html/whopay.htm

I'd have to look some more to find the average federal tax paid - but it's not where near the marginal rate.

[lonestarnot]

4. Interesting that.

Thank you.

[EVDebs]

5. Your site's chart shows it best re state and local taxes

the wealthiest always keep the federal income taxes percentages as their sole reference !

[lumberjack_jeff]

6. It's worse than that

The "federal income tax percentages" that they use for a reference is "marginal rate"

In other words, the dollar of income which has the highest tax rate. People in the top 1% have a disproportionate share of their income via capital gains which is taxed at a top rate of 15%.

Person who is in the top 1% may be in the 35% tax bracket, but their effective tax rate may only be 15-20% - far less than a middle class worker.

[EVDebs]

8. We're getting hammered and the pols are giving tax cuts to the richest. Nutz. nt

[EVDebs]

2. I think David Cay Johnston's book Perfectly Legal has this

The US has a 'flat tax' when all combined taxes (federal, state, local) are accounted for.

Chapter 7, Page 93-94

"The tax burden on the top 1 percent is nowhere near that high (43% of all taxes), although so many politicians and antitax advocates have made such false claims so many times that millions of Americans believe it to be true. The top 1 percent paid 36 percent of the income taxes in 2001. But when the burden of all federal taxes is added up--corporate profits, estate, gift, Social Security, Medicare and excise taxes--they only paid 25 percent."...

"For 2001 the government found that all taxes at all levels of government consumed 19 percent of incomes of the best-off fifth of American, those individuals and families whose average income was $116,666 that year. Down at the bottom the poorest fifth, whose average income was $7, 946, paid 18 percent.

What this means is that the entire tax system at all levels amounts to a flat tax, one that is crushing the poor and the one that does not extract the harsh levies so often cited by politicians who owe their allegiance to the political donor class."

BTW, if you want to read the most incendiary books, or give them as Christmas gifts to your freeper inlaws for instance, I can think of Perfectly Legal along with Kevin Phillip's book Wealth and Democracy. There will be much freeper 'weeping and gnashing of teeth' after they read those two !

In Perfectly Legal, Johnston goes on to explain the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics annual consumer expenditure survey ( see
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.toc.htm for more information and research and also the wikipedia site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey )

You can check the "Personal taxes" at
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/aggregate/2005/higherincome.txt
scroll to the bottom of the page

[LSK]

3. Im not sure but after $95k they dont pay FICA tax

[The Straight Story]

7. And don't forget taxes on things like smokes (which liberals love) and other consumption taxes

which rarely affect the wealthy.

Why so many want to tax the poor more than the wealthy is beyond me. Don't raise cigarette taxes to pay for schip and such, raise luxiry taxes and capital gains.