The U.S. Income Tax Burden:..."legal plunder." ... Where is the hoel in the logic?

The U.S. Income Tax Burden: An Analysis of Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Numbers by Sugi Sorensen and Stephen Cobb Last Revised: 17-Apr-2000

Introduction

• Below is an analysis of Congressional Budget Office (CB0) report entitled "Preliminary Estimates of Effective Tax Rates" (07-Sep-1999). The raw numbers can be scrutinized here:
  http://www.cbo.gov/showdoc.cfm?index=1545&from=4&sequence=0
• All I did was try to make heads or tails of the data by plotting it and extracting the most salient data. The Income Tax Burden is defined simply as who pays U.S. income taxes in the form of individual and corporate income taxes, payroll taxes, and federal excise taxes.
• Based on this information, the following conclusions clearly emerge:
  An enormous percentage of taxes are payed by a minority of Americans:
  The Top 1% of taxpayers pay 29% of all taxes.
  The Top 5% of taxpayers pay 50% of all taxes.
• Our tax system is not so much progressive as it is confiscatory -- Frederic Bastiat called this phenomenon "legal plunder." ...
• ...
• The Top 1% of income earners (comprising about 1 million families) earn about 15% of the total income earned by all wage earners [??? vs, total income? including capital gains?] in the United States, yet they pay almost 30% of all individual income taxes.