Who pays what in taxes?

The next time someone tells you the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes, remember this article from today's Wall Street Journal. Remember Al Gore's repeated lecture on how the "wealthiest one percent" weren't paying their fair share? Ever wonder what percentage of all federal taxes the bottom FIFTY percent of taxpayers pay? How about 3.3%. Yeah. Here's the WSJ:

"First, the new data show that the bottom 50% of Americans in income--U.S. households with an income below the median of $44,389--paid a smaller share of total income taxes in 2004 (3.3%) than in Bill Clinton's last year in office (3.9%). That 3.3% is the lowest share of total income taxes paid by the bottom half of earners in at least 30 years, and probably ever. The majority of American families with an income below $40,000 pay no income tax at all today, and many of them also get a welfare subsidy from the Earned Income Tax Credit that effectively offsets much of what they pay in payroll taxes.

By contrast, Americans with an income in the top 1% paid 36.9% of all federal income taxes in 2004, down slightly from 37.4% at what was the height of the dot-com boom in 2000. But the top 5% and 10% of earners saw an increase in their tax share over that same period, with the top 5%'s share rising to 57.1% in 2004 from 56.5% in 2000. If this isn't the definition of a highly 'progressive,' a k a redistributionist, tax code, we don't know what is."

OK. So I'm not rich and I'm no big fan of trying to make rich people richer at the expense of the poor. But I do believe in logic. When more than half of taxpayers combine to pay 3.3% of all taxes collected, I'm pretty sure this is not a system that is designed to prop up the robber barrons at the expense of the little people.

People who make more money pay more in taxes for two reasons. First, if the tax rate was set at 15% for example, it is obvious that 15% of $10,000 is a heck of a lot less than 15% of $1 million. But many people don't realize that those with higher incomes also pay higher rates. To use the above example, if people who made $10,000 paid 15% of that, people who make $1 million would actually pay something more like 35% of their income in taxes. How is this system so unfair to poor people again?