Yes, There’s Real Money at the Top! | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities |

It is a popular conservative conceit that low income people pay no taxes.  They accomplish this by focusing only on the federal income tax, which at the bottom end of the scale takes little from the lower middle-class and poor.  But there are lots of taxes everyone pays: Social Security, Medicare, sales taxes, real estate taxes (indirectly if you are a renter).  So everyone pays significant taxes.  - GWC
   Off the Charts Blog | Center on Budget and Policy Priorities | Blog Archive | Yes, There’s Real Money at the Top: When billionaire investor Warren Buffet recently called on policymakers to “get serious about shared sacrifice” by raising taxes on the nation’s wealthiest people, some critics claimed that this wouldn’t make a serious dent in our budget problems. Nonsense.

IRS data show that the top 1 percent of taxpayers had a combined income of $1.7 trillion in 2008, the most recent year available. This is fully 20 percent of the nation’s total adjusted gross income — and much more than the bottom half of the population had (around 13 percent).