On Jun 28, 1:58 am, D Peter Maus wrote:

The top 1% pay over a third, 34.27% of all income taxes. (Up from
2003: 33.71%)

The top 5% pay 54.36% of all income taxes (Up from 2002: 53.80%).

The top 10% pay 65.84% (Up from 2002: 65.73%).

The top 25% pay 83.88% (Down from 2002: 83.90%).

The top 50% pay 96.54% (Up from 2002: 96.50%).

The bottom 50%? They pay a paltry 3.46% of all income taxes (Down
from 2002: 3.50%).

The top 1% is paying nearly ten times the federal income taxes than
the bottom 50%!

Those are smoke and mirror figures put forth to placate the public.
Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the tax code knows that there
is a special set of rules that the rich have had written into the tax
code so that they do not pay the stated rates on the progressive tax
system in the USA.

Perhaps you should do more research and listen less to what Rush
Limbaugh and the other corporate media errand boys want you to
believe.

America: Who Really Pays the Taxes? by Donald Barlett
From Publishers Weekly
For readers who have ever had the sneaking suspicion that they're
being shafted, the latest book from this Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative team ( America: What Went Wrong? ) provides the facts,
figures, names and anecdotes to prove it. Their goal is to show how
all those abstract terms bandied about on the Sunday morning talk
shows affect the average taxpayer, particularly anyone whose family
income is between, say, $25,000 and $150,000. Wealthy individuals
squirrel away money through tax-free bonds, charitable-donations
deductions and racehorses, among other write-offs; and the wealthiest
corporations benefit from foreign tax credits, deductions for
estimated worth of brand names and even the writing-off of interest on
loans taken out to pay their stockholders (Weren't stockholders
supposed to share both profits and losses?). All of which, the authors
note with jackhammer regularity, leaves Joe and Jane Shmoe holding the
tab. The authors are bipartisan in their apportionment of blame,
rounding up not only the usual Republican presidential suspects but
also Democrats like LBJ (whose "unified budget" amounted to a grand-
scale doctoring of the books), Dan Rostenkowski (superannuated
Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee) and even independent
Ross Perot (whose tax-free income in 1991 was somewhere between $18
and $87 million). Their "modest proposal" on reforming the tax system
is indeed that: one based largely on eliminating deductions and making
all income--no matter how earned--equally taxable. Barlett and
Steele's greatest achievement, though, is to have painstakingly
translated mountains of often deliberately obscure material, thereby
making their book a dream for those who've never quite grasped what
government, corporations and the wealthiest few are doing--and a
nightmare for those who have and want to keep that knowledge to
themselves.