2008 Income and Taxes
So I was getting frustrated with partisan rhetoric about taxes and income. Yes, talking about percentages and rates and proportions and whatnot can often increase clarity with complex data, but sometimes these are also used to conceal or distort some aspect of the information. I decided to make my own graph of 2008 incomes by percentile of the US population, including each group’s income taxes paid. I was working with some chunky data from here, so it’s not a pretty, smooth curve. I used Excel to expand (in an ugly fashion) the groups so you get a rough (very rough) idea of the different group sizes.
The groups are by percentile of income in the US: the lowest-earning 50% up through the highest-earning 0.1% of the population. The height of each bar represents average annual income, and the height of the blue portion within the bar represents the amount of taxes paid.
You’ll notice I had to make the graph extremely big so that the lowest income group’s income even showed up enough to give a hint of a line for the tax they paid.
And 2008 was considered to be a bad year for the super-wealthy.
(click to see the full image with enough detail to be even slightly useful)
US income and taxes by percentile - 2008
Originally published at bobbyfiend.com. You can comment here or there.