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Giving Most-Productive Their Due In One-Sided Tax-Burden Debate
...As the accompanying table shows, the U.S. is not much less dependent on top earners for funding its social insurance programs than it is for its general revenues.

The bottom 51% of earners have a negative income-tax burden — due to refundable credits such as the earned income credit — but they still only shoulder 13% of total payroll tax revenues. In contrast, the top 49% of earners pay 102.4% of income-tax revenues (making up for refundable credits' cost) but still pay 87% of payroll taxes too.

Judged as a ratio of their population percentage vs. their contribution percentage, the difference grows dramatically up the income scale.

The top 3% of earners pay almost 20 times their population rate in income-tax revenues and over five times their rate in payroll tax revenues. The bottom 51% of earners contribute just one-tenth their population level in combined federal tax revenues.

While social insurance programs are regressive in their taxation, they are progressive in their distribution — low-income contributors receiving a greater relative payout than higher-income contributors do. This is possible only because of the top earners' disproportionate contribution.

Illuminating in its own right, this distributional examination also underscores how one-sided the tax debate has become. Top earners are immediately transformed into "the wealthy" — despite the fact that there is substantial lifetime movement up and down the income scale. ...