Cheneys paid an effective tax rate of 23.4 percent ... less than Buffet's secretary ....

Bush economics: 'Only the little people pay taxes' | ROBYN BLUMNER | Article Last Updated: 08/06/2007 12:02:45 AM MDT
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Some of the biggest stories of the past few weeks have been about the great tax dodges by the financial kings of the hedge fund and private equity world. Investment managers making upwards of a $1 billion a year are paying lower tax rates than the people who teach their children or deliver their mail.

Warren Buffett, the world's third-richest man, blasted the U.S. tax system earlier this summer because he pays a lower rate of taxes than his secretary. Buffett said, without trying to avoid taxes, that he paid 17.7 percent on the $46 million he made in 2006 while his secretary who made $60,000 was taxed at 30 percent.

Unseemly? Immoral? Outrageous? You bet! This imbalance is a consequence of decades of tax reforms that have benefited those at the top, with a marked acceleration under President Bush. ...
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Piketty and Saez looked across all major forms of wealth and income taxes, including payroll, estate, income and corporate taxes. In 1960, they say that the top 0.01 percent of earners paid 71 percent of their income in federal taxes. In 2005, the same 0.01 percent, or those making more than $18 million annually, paid only about 35 percent.
Taxes for America's wealthiest are at historic lows, according to the economists. Meanwhile, the average federal tax rate for the middle class has remained roughly constant or ticked up a few percentage points, depending on where in the middle one falls.

Flattening the income tax, reducing if not eliminating capital gains, estate and corporate taxes - all in the service of the rich - have been long-standing Republican priorities. Bush purposely allowed his tax cuts to exacerbate the Alternative Minimum Tax problem for the middle class in order to give bigger breaks to those at the very top.

According to Citizens for Tax Justice, Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife saved $111,000 in taxes last year thanks to the breaks he and the president stewarded through Congress. The Cheneys paid an effective tax rate of 23.4 percent on $1.8 million in income in 2006. Also less than Warren Buffett's secretary. ...