James Joyner grabs some of Greg Mankiw's data on effective federal tax rates and notes that the top .01 percentile is paying 31.5 percent of their income in federal taxes while the middle quintile pays 14.2 percent. "President-elect Obama’s call for a massive tax cut aimed at the 'middle class' will be a neat trick, indeed," says Joyner. There are lots of possible responses to this sort of thing (namely that if you include state and local taxes, the middle class pay a much higher rate than the federal numbers imply, while the rates of the rich barely budge), but in the current climate, it's hard to see where the anger will come from. The middle fifth of the income distribution begins at a yearly income of $34,738 per household. Assume they pay 20 percent in total taxes (it's probably a bit higher), and they're left with $27,798 to live on. That's fairly rough if you're raising a family. The top 0.01 percent, by contrast, begins at a yearly income of $20,471,271. Assume they pay, including state and local taxes, 35 percent of their income (they probably pay less), and they're living on a mere $15,353,453 a year. It's hard to imagine the electorate taking much pity on that sort of suffering.
