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Total Tax Burdens, by Quintile
The CBO (Congressional Budget Office) did a study to measure the burden of all Federal taxes by quintile. The results are listed below, and fully support the predictions of supply-side economists that the rich would shoulder and increasing share of the taxes via lower rates.
| Percentage Shares of Total Tax Burden | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Quintile | Top 10% | Top 5% | |||||
| Year | Lowest | 2nd low | Middle | 2nd high | Highest | ||
| 1977 | 2.0 | 7.3 | 13.5 | 21.7 | 55.4 | 38.7 | 27.6 |
| 1980 | 1.6 | 7.0 | 13.4 | 22.2 | 55.7 | 38.7 | 27.1 |
| 1985 | 1.9 | 7.0 | 13.1 | 21.9 | 55.9 | 39.0 | 27.3 |
| 1990 | 1.6 | 6.6 | 12.6 | 21.0 | 58.1 | 41.8 | 30.4 |
Congressional liberals, upset at this dose of reality, ordered a new study that rolled employer Social Security taxes, as well as other federal taxes not directly paid by the wage earner into the mix. Perhaps the most egregious of these was corporate income taxes. Only the most extreme anti-Reagan fanatic could think that corporate income taxes were paid by the wage earners. In addition the study assumed that the poorer you were, the more you paid of the corporate income taxes. (!) The result, often posted by liberals on the net, does show the poor paying more taxes while the rich pay less due to the regressive nature of Social Security and sales-style taxes. However, this "study" is invalidated by the very data is purports to measure. None of those additional taxes are paid by the wage earner, and thus have no business being in a study of taxes paid by the wage earner. In addition, the "assumptions" made by the revisionists, such as the poor paying most of the corporate income taxes, are so ludicrous that they would be laughed out of any peer-reviewed journal.
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