Individual and Corporate Taxes

David Cay Johnson, via Mark Thoma:

Those taxpayers with the highest incomes, the top 400, have seen their real income tax rate fall from 30 percent in 1992 to 16.6 percent in 2007. That is a drop of more than two-fifths. Even if you take into account the charitable gifts of the Top 400, their 2007 effective income tax rate was 18.1 percent. A single taxpayer who does not itemize this year will hit an effective tax rate of 18.1 percent at $74,000.
The same pattern of taxes being progressive to a point and then becoming regressive shows up in corporate income taxes.
In 2008, for example, the top one-tenth of 1 percent of corporations paid an effective tax rate of 14.7 percent of their profits, while the next 8,269 corporations with assets between $250 million and $2.5 billion paid 15.2 percent. That both GE and the New York Times Co. are in the top group and pay such widely disparate real tax rates shows how averages need to be viewed in context.
Now what happens when we look at actual cash paid when measured against not book profits reported to shareholders, but taxable profits measured under the code? The disparity between the corporate Gargantuans and the Lilliputians is much greater.
The top one-tenth of 1 percent of corporations paid at a 21.2 percent effective rate, while companies with as little as $500,000 in assets paid more.