Nearly 50 percent of Americans pay no income taxes at all: report

It's something the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tracks annually: the top 400 highest adjusted gross incomes. In 2007, the last year with IRS data, the average income for those 400 was nearly $345 million. Their average federal income tax rate was 17 percent, down from 26 percent in 1992. Meanwhile, the average federal income tax rate for all taxpayers declined from 9.9 percent to 9.3 percent.

The top federal income tax rate is 35 percent, but the top rate on capital gains is 15 percent. Also, there are deductions that most would say are political suicide to touch, such as the mortgage deduction, child deduction, and on and on.

Aside from the fact that most people don't read these statistics, why, therefore, is it so hard to raise taxes on the wealthy? Robert Reich, former U.S. Secretary of Labor, notes that the super-rich will use tax loopholes and deductions anyway, so "the government should aim high." He added that during the 1950s, when the top income tax rate was 91 percent, the rich used loopholes and deductions that reduced their effective top rate by 50 percent to 60 percent.

In fact, some of the wealthy want to pay more. While Senator Orrin Hatch, (R-UT), Republican on the Senate Finance Committee believes that the rich should just voluntarily pay more, there is a group called United for a Fair Economy who believes the rich should be forced to pay more, via higher tax rates. And the members of that group are all rich themselves.

On such rich person, Eric Schoenberg, spoke to AP. He inherited money and has a healthy portfolio from when he was an investment banker. 2009 was a bad year for him; his investments "only" brought him $200K. Normally, he makes "north of half a million a year." In 2009, his bad year, his federal income tax bill was slightly more than $2,000. "I simply point out to people, 'Do you think this is reasonable, that somebody in my circumstances should only be paying 1 percent of their income in tax?'"

The percentage of people who paid no income tax was 47 percent in 2009.

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