Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's Link: How You Can Have a Billion-Dollar Income in America and Pay No Taxes, at Alternet.  It is an interview with David Cay Johnson.  From the interview:

DCJ: You will hear that the top 1 percent pay 40 percent of the taxes. It's not true. The federal individual income tax is only about one out of every five dollars of all taxes raised in America. We have federal taxes, state taxes, local taxes, payroll taxes, and I'm ignoring all the things that used to be covered by taxes that are now paid by fees -- three different fees for using the airport, surcharges when you rent a car, etc.
While it's true the top 1 percent are paying around 40 percent of the total income tax, in recent years they also have earned as much as 20 percent of the income -- 21 percent in 2008, the last year we have full data. Because their income has gone up vastly faster, the share of income tax paid by people at the top has gone up -- even though their rates have been cut.
It's important to recognize what's happened to incomes in America. More than half of the income in the top one percent goes to the top 10th of one percent -- one out of a thousand families in America. For every dollar they made on average in 1980, in the year 2008 they made $4, adjusted for inflation.
But in 2008 the bottom 90 percent of Americans earned on average a dollar and a penny for every dollar they earned in 1980. In 28 years, their average income went up 1 percent, $300 and change for the year, basically a dollar a day.
I did an analysis comparing 1961 incomes to 2007. The bottom 90 percent -- after higher income and social security taxes -- was making just a little bit more than they made in 1961. For each dollar in 1961, they made a dollar and twenty cents in 2007. The group at the top got $36.50 after tax per dollar they made in 1961. That's 180 times as much growth.

This must stop.  Income taxes must become much more progressive.  Go yell at your congressman.