Originally Posted by nation-x

First of all... you provide an opinion piece as proof... typical for conservatives. Secondly, if you didn't notice, all of those numbers are from a 3 year old report. We were talking about income tax... not excise tax. This is a perfect example of how conservatives try to muddy the water... if you want to include all taxes, there are alot of taxes that hit lower income people much harder than the wealthy purely because it's a much larger percentage of their income. Gas tax, sales tax, etc.

Here is the title of the report from the CBO that he is reporting from:

"Historical Effective Federal Tax Rates: 1979 to 2006"

Now... look at the report... specifically the line where it says "Individual Income Taxes".

Top 10%: 16.0
Top 5%: 17.5
Top 1%: 19.0

Which part of that did you miss. The average of those 3 is 17.5%. If you want to quibble over .5% we can.