Wealthy pay most of country's taxes

In last week's Acorn, Patricia Ahmad bestows a "Scrooge" award on a letter writer. In the spirit of the season of giving, I honor Ms. Ahmad with her own award- for economic illiteracy.

She intimates that "the government" protects only the rights of the rich and that (get ready) "the rich" and corporations pay only "7 percent of the taxes." She does not cite her source for the statistic.

In reality, corporations alone pay 24 percent of total U.S. tax receipts, per the latest official statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).

As for "the rich", the latest figures from the IRS show that the top 1 percent of earners (ranked by AGI) paid 37 percent of the national personal tax bill.

Did you catch that?

If the taxpayers in the U.S. were represented by 100 people standing in a row ranked by income from poorest to wealthiest, the last person in line paid more than one-third of the total taxes collected.

Who benefits? The bottom 50 percent of tax "payers"- the first 50 in the line- who altogether contributed only three cents out of every personal tax dollar paid.

One reason why the rich pay more taxes, of course, is that they earn more. The other reason is our progressive tax system. IRS statistics show that those earning in the $10,000-20,000 range pay only 2.2 percent of their income in tax. The proportion paid in taxes rises steadily as incomes rise, until the $1 to 2 million income range, where 25 percent of income is paid.

No doubt the data can be sliced different ways, but a figure of 7 percent is not credible. Interested readers can check the data on the BEA and IRS websites. James Prieger Associate Professor of Public Policy, Pepperdine University