Quote:President Obama has constantly complained about the rich not paying their "fair share." But a new Congressional Budget Office report shows that the rich were paying more than their fair share of taxes before the numerous hikes he imposed.

The CBO looks at the distribution of household income and federal taxes up through 2011, the last year for which it has data. It found, for example, that:

While the top 1% of households accounted for 15% of all income, they paid 35% of all federal income taxes. The bottom 20% accounted for 5.3% of income, but they got more in refundable tax credits, on average, than they paid in income taxes.

Even when you include payroll and other federal taxes, the bottom 20% carried just 0.6% of the total tax burden.

Overall federal tax rates on the top 1% have averaged around 30% for more thaFn three decades, but the rate paid by the bottom 20% has dropped steadily, going from 9% in 1984 to 1.9% in 2011.

Despite all the hullabaloo about how Bush's tax cuts favored the rich, the share of income taxes paid by the top 1% climbed from 22% in Bush's first year in office to 25% by 2008. The share paid by the bottom group dropped from 1.4% to 0.4%.

Yet somehow, mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post manage to report with a straight face that, thanks to Obama's tax hikes, "the very richest Americans are finally shelling out a bit more in federal taxes."

The country is also extremely generous when it comes to writing checks to lower income families. So much so, in fact, that the bottom 40% of households — 48.6 million of them — now get more than half their income in the form of transfer payments, the CBO report shows.


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