Link is the clickable one at the bottom.

Includes Federal Income (and offsets), payroll, and excise taxes. As you can see, due to the progressive nature of federal income taxes, up until the top quintile (the bars mark, if I'm not mistaken, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4, next 10%, next 5%, top 5% - including the top 400, and the top 400 separate), where it plateaus and starts to drop again, because such an insignificant portion of their wealth comes from income as opposed to other means (capital gains, etc).

State and local taxes are usually regressive (numbers from 2007 as well):

http://www.policyshop.net/storage/Demos-Stateandlocaltaxrates.png?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1333977357388

which only tends to exacerbate the problem.

Noteworthy exclusions from these lists: corporate taxes (which depends on whether you consider them to be property of the top tenth of a percent or so, or separate entities), and one-time taxes (estate tax in particular) which are often cited as well, but are rather disingenuous for an annual graph.


So basically, the poor benefit somewhat from the progressive federal tax, as they're intended to, as they have practically no money to spend on necessities. Tax rate increases as your income increases, until you reach a certain threshold at about 6 figures, where (in large part due to the tax cuts on the upper end since Eisenhower, coupled with low long-term capital gains taxes) the effective tax rate starts dropping to where the rich not only have more money to start with, but they're paying less on it than those in lower tiers.