Top % of wage earners Paid this per cent of total taxes rec’d
.1% 20%
1% 37%
10% 68%
25% 85%
50% 97%
And the bottom 47% paid zero taxes. So that’s pretty progressive by any standard, and has been for some time. The problem is the current tax rates don’t keep up with the shift in income from middle income to very high income. A couple more tax brackets could help fix that. Pawlenty’s overall cuts are ridiculous.

Visually, when I look at those lines, it makes it ‘seem like’ the lowest quintile contains ‘about the same amount of people’ as the top 1%. After all, those are equally sized bars there.

I realize that the point of this chart was to show the relative Bush-Pawlenty lucre heading to the stratosphere of the uberust amongst us, but still… that’s kind of visually misleading.

Note also there is no real visual distinction **in terms of population, in terms of ‘numbers of human critters’** between the second quintile, or the top quintile or the top 1% or the top .1 percent.

We kind of ‘appear’ to all be equal. Population densities are all smooshed together, and therefore these do not really appear to be meaningful.

If I saw 1000 dots, and a few (like, ten of them for the top 1%) were about 20 times the diameter of all the rest, then I might get a clue.

Then measure the diameters of that .1% and wheeee!! The areas covered by those dots would really be even more revealing AND also you could have a better sense of the population distribution underlying that data.

You could even do a two-color graph of the dot concept; have the blue at as one layer atop the red ‘Pawlenty’ layer.

Perhaps we might then all begin to grasp the relationships more accurately, rapidly, and cogently.

But what I don’t get from this graph is how teensy-tinsy that whole 1/10th of 1% of the population is.

I suppose that if I had 100 dots (1 per 1/100th) that would be a start.

I would have to multiply by ten to get the 1/10th of 100.
So then, I’d have 1000 dots.

So one dot in 1,000 would get… welll…. let’s just say this graph would be more helpful for me if that ONE single dot was calculated in size relative to those other 999 dots.

Then, I might have a better grasp of why Pawlenty’s so-called economics are knuckleheaded. Plus, I wouldn’t have to think too hard nor take 5 minutes to do the math and get a rough guestimate.

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776: “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”