FAIRLY UNFAIR: The top 1% receives 19% of all income, pays 49% of all income taxes.

Since in America we tend to see ourselves in one of three classes (upper, middle, lower) I tried to manipulate the data from the link above into three (roughly equal) groups; first by percent of tax returns filed (i.e., population), and second by percent of income earned.

Here are the results:

The lower third generally gets a credit back larger than the taxes paid. The upper third pays the bulk of income taxes, between 72% and 95%, depending on where the cutoff between the middle and upper classes is defined. The middle third (roughly speaking, those with incomes between $50-$125 thousand) pick up the tab for the lowest income class and then contribute (again, roughly) $200 billion of the total tax burden.

I did find two things somewhat surprising in the report, the first being the 'lowness' of the average tax rate. I am by no means in the top third of incomes as defined above, but I estimate this year that I will pay roughly 12% of my gross annual income in federal income taxes alone. And that number is consistent with previous years. So why is my actual tax rate 4 points higher than the average cited?

The second surprise required downloading the 'Fairness and Tax Policy' pdf, where I found projections for mean and median income (page 18):

The staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that, in 2015, the mean income of all tax returns ... is projected to be $77,821. The mean taxable income of all returns is projected to be $42,268. The median income of all tax returns is projected to be $43,930; the median taxable income of all tax returns is projected to be $11,034.

The difference between mean and median is explainable by the simple fact that the minimum income is zero, while the maximum income is ... whatever Mark Zuckerberg makes. Still, the skew is more than I would have expected.

But what I find surprising is the difference between income and taxable income. For mean income, taxable income is 54% of total income; for median income, it is 26%. For me, the ratio of taxable to total is consistently about 78%. So, again, what am I doing wrong?