Sociological Images
Lisa Wade, PhD
04/18/2017
More than 80% of the US federal government’s budget comes from payroll and income taxes. The National Priorities Project is dedicated to helping Americans understand how that money is spent. Here’s the data for 2016:
The highest individual income “top” tax rate in history was 94%; that was the rate at which any income above 200,000 was taxed in 1945, equivalent to almost 2.8 million today. Today it’s 39.6%. The Nobel laureate Peter Diamond and economist Emmanuel Saez argue that the top tax rate should optimally be 73%.
Last year corporate taxes made up only about 11%...
