The figures that the campaign issued to make this point, however, obfuscated rather than illuminated the issue. Those figures showed the share of federal income taxes that different income groups paid, omitting payroll, estate, and other taxes. This made the share of taxes said to be paid by those at the top of the income spectrum into a larger percentage. The campaign then compared these figures to the percentage of the tax cut that each income group would receive when the proposal to repeal the estate tax was omitted, even though repeal of the estate tax represents nearly one quarter of the total Bush tax cut by 2010, according to Joint Committee on Taxation estimates. This made the share of the tax cut that would to go high-income individuals look smaller than it actually is.
Families pay both income and other federal taxes.
For a substantial majority of American families, their payroll tax bills exceed their income taxes. Undertaking an appropriate comparison thus entails examining the relationship between the share of total federal taxes that a particular income group pays and the share of the overall Bush tax cut that group would receive. When this is done, the finding is clear that the share of the tax cuts that the highest-income Americans would receive substantially exceeds the share of the taxes they pay. Even if the Bush tax cut did give each income group a share of the tax cuts that equaled the share of federal taxes each group pays, that would not necessarily represent sound policy. Stated another way, this principle means that the more fabulously wealthy those at the top of the income scale become, the larger the proportion of the tax cuts that should be directed to them.