You often see progressives touting charts that illustrate the steep decline in the top marginal income tax rate, but it’s really not clear how to interpret that kind of information since the tax base is always changing. But ThinkProgress has looked at some newly released IRS data that lets you calculate the effective tax rate being paid by the top 400 highest earners:
At the same time, their incomes have skyrocketed:
This is only 400 people so it’s not like you can balance the budget just by soaking them, but “If the richest 400 Americans simply paid the same effective rate in 1995 as they did in 2007, the government would have collected over $3 billion in additional revenue.” That’s not nothing.
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