What Percentage of IRS Revenue Comes from the Top 5%?
 

What percentage of the IRS tax revenue comes from the top 5% of Earners?

Just post your link and get it over with.

I thought it was a rhetorical question

I dunno why everyone is all about oh need to eat the rich and such. WTF isn't this a Mercedes forum? eat the poor!

Poor people are stringy and taste funny.

The top 10% have 45% of total income but pay 70% of the total taxes. Yeah..sounds like they need to punished for being so greedy.

In 2010 it was 47.7% and 59%

There's a chart included in the previously posted link.

The sad number is how many people pay NO federal tax.

I don't think it's sad at all, their money is better spent locally through sales tax.

Don't know how your reading it, but the chart I'm looking at (in your link) indicates the top 10% accounted for 45.2% of the total AGI and their share of total income taxes was 70.6%

I am devastated by the news. We must give them a tax break so they can pay half what their secretaries pay. After all they are the job creators, right?

If they have good Accountants they don't pay any. I know a number of people who would be among the top five percent. They all have people that know how to invest their money wisely to minimize their taxes.

Wouldn't want to invest wisely, nope, wouldn't be prudent.

Does invested money do society no good?

It depends on where it is invested.

I can remember when you would get a six to one tax write off for investing in oil wells. The Baker-Hughes rig count would always spike in December not because December is a great time to drill for oil but because Accountants were telling their Clients to dump money and where to dump it.

So a lot of folks in the oil field made a lot of cash and sometimes a well came in and the investors did, too.

Real Estate was once a great investment since you could depreciate a property over, I think, 17 years. At the same time, if you were renting it out, someone else was making the payments. And all you had tied up in each property was 20% of the appraised value.

I know the depreciation rate for commercial buildings was once seven years. At the end of that time you sold it and built a new one. The bottom line to you: No taxes paid since the interest and depreciation vastly exceeded the income. When you sold the building you rolled the gain over into the new building or declared it as a long-term capital gain.

And what made it work for you was that the rent exceeded the payments and upkeep on the building. Depreciation wiped out all of your profits on paper, so no taxes were due.