The ‘47 Percent’ Pay Their Fair Share

TPM had an interesting CHART OF THE DAY: The ‘47 Percent’ Pay Their Fair Share "The fact of the matter, though, is that those other taxes constitute a huge chunk of federal revenues. Check out the charts below. Over the 58 years preceding the Lesser Depression, the share of federal revenues that came from individual income taxes has remained fairly stable, fluctuating between 40 and 50 percent, and peaking just before George W. Bush slashed rates in 2001."



I think I'd prefer this chart if instead of percentages it showed real inflation adjusted dollars. Did the percentage of the tax paid for payroll taxes go up because they paid more taxes or merely because other things went down? I'd also like to see this in comparison to federal expenditures. So payroll taxes are social security and medicare, I know that a big cause of the increase in government spending is the growth in these programs, maybe it's appropriate that their revenues went up? Still it does seem obvious that the decrease in corporate taxes seems unfair, particularly with Republicans yelling that our corporate taxes are (still) way too high and are stifling job creation. But wait, are all the payroll taxes paid by individuals? Aren't half of them paid by the employer? What if you counted half of the current 32% payroll tax as paid by corporations, so with the 10% corporate income tax, that's 26% paid by corps, which is almost exactly the same as in 1950.