Share Of Income Taxes Paid By Top 10 Percent And Bottom 50 Percent: 2001-2010 Chart

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From The American, "The Left’s Flip-Flop on the Bush Tax Cuts" by Steve Conover:

Figure 1.

Source: The American Enterprise Institute

Presumably we want the rich to shoulder more of the tax burden. The Clinton-era top rate of 39.6 percent applied to income taxes; the Bush policy lowered this rate to 35 percent. But Figure 1 shows that, even though the top income tax rate went down, the top 10 percent of taxpayers ended up paying a higher share of income taxes after the Bush "tax cuts."
***First: is it wise to assume that a feel-good increase in the top tax rate will really extract a higher share of the total taxes from the top earners? If so, by all means, let’s proceed — but we should at least understand that recent history doesn’t necessarily support our case. Second: just what is a “fair share”? The top 10 percent of income tax payers paid 64 percent of the burden when Clinton left office, and they are paying significantly more of the burden today — so if they’re not paying their "fair share" yet, they were even further away from paying their "fair share" under Clinton.