"It’s often claimed that the richest Americans pay a disproportionate share of taxes while those in the bottom half pay nothing. These claims ignore the many taxes that most Americans are subject to — federal payroll taxes, federal excise taxes, state and local taxes — and focus instead on just one tax, the federal personal income tax. The other taxes are mostly regressive, meaning they take a larger share of income from a poor or middle-income family than they take from a rich family."
So basically, conservatives choose to ignore the hollow argument about how the wealthy pay a disproportionately high amount of taxes since the more regressive sales taxes hit everyone and Social Security taxes are capped so people above a certain income level (the amount of which escapes me right now) pay the same regardless of their income.
So read the whole report to figure out why this graph flattens halfway through and then starts to drop at the right.
