how many people have no clue how progressive our tax system has become.

how much they truly pay in taxes.

Sure, you pay your marginal bracket (avg effective tax rate hovers around 12%, if I recall though the wealthy skew this number) and you pay your 7.6% in FICA/MED taxes.

Well, in effect you actually pay the other 7.6% of FICA/MED taxes since that is money that your employer could otherwise have paid you in salary. Note: even if they chose not to, one way or another it’s an individual who takes that 7.6% in the shorts – so we might as well assign it to the employee.

On top of that, corporations don’t really pay tax – but they do collect about 20% of the nations tax revenue from individuals (employees, stockholders/owners, and customers) and remit that to the government. Not every item you buy has a 20% “hidden” tax embedded it in – some are less, some are more – but it’s fair to say that some of the cost of that DVD you just bought went to the government as corporate tax. The 20% is probably not spread evenly across all Americans – the lower two quintiles probably eat a much smaller percentage of the corporate tax burden – but there is still a hidden tax burden on Americans via the corporate tax. 2nd highest corporate tax in the world, by the way, and the Libs wonder why corporations are moving jobs overseas?

Anyway, let’s add it up:

Most Americans pay more in SS tax than income tax, so I’ll assume avg Joe pays 7% effective tax.

7% effective income tax +
7.6% FICA/SS +
7.6% Employer FICA/SS (yeah, really) +
XX% of (20% corporate tax). My SWAG for avg Joe is another 7%, but as you move above the median income your share gets bigger.

My math makes that: 29.2% tax rate, not counting state taxes. Congratulations, Federal Government, you are 4.2% ahead of Karl Marx’ goal – although he was talking about marginal rates.