Quote:
Originally posted by taxwonk
The top 5% of taxpayers pay 53.3% of total tax.
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Touché.
Quote:
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Second, if you read the quote more carefully, you'll see that it's corrected to take into account capital losses. The drop is attributable to a lower capital gains tax rate.
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here's the quote I read:
- The fall in both the share of AGI and income tax for the top 1 percentile, and corresponding increase in the average tax rate, was largely attributable to the reduction in net capital gains (less losses) for these taxpayers.
there's no mention there that this results from a lower rate--is it in the IRS pub? Certainly it would not surprise me if k-gains went down in 2001. No bull market and lots of post-2000 losses to offset any gains. (if it's somewhere in teh IRS report, fine, but I don't have time to read 78 pages now to find your source; I did have time, however, to note that from 2000 to 2001, the average tax rate declined for all income brackets, except the top one (see last line of chart, page 5).
edited to fix margins -- t.s.
