Thanks for Paying Your Federal Income Taxes, Here's Your Itemized "Taxpayer Receipt"

With the U.S.' deadline for filing income tax returns for 2012 upon us today, we thought it might be interesting to find out which Americans aren't really paying a fair share of all the income they earn in the form of income taxes. The answer may be found in our chart below, which we previously featured here:

James Stewart has a long attack this weekend on the one idea from the presidential campaign which managed to receive genuine bipartisan support: the cap on deductions. He’s a first-rate reporter and columnist, so it’s worth going into some detail about all the different places he’s wrong. Stewart starts off his column by summing up his two main arguments against a cap on deductions:

IF YOU live in a developed country your taxes will probably increase. Politicians won't necessarily tell you this. They would rather pretend that someone else will pay for our profligacy. In America, Republicans claim they can cut spending enough that taxes won’t need to increase. But if they are to balance the budget over the long run, they will have to make drastic cuts to services and entitlements: large enough to rattle an armchair libertarian. Across the aisle, Democrats often say we can close the gap if the “rich pay their fair share”.

The decisions over the past 30 years to pass huge huge tax bills to those in the future is unsustainable. Saying you cut taxes when all you actually do is postpone them is dishonest. However, many people go along with such false statements so politicians have learned to buy votes today by raising taxes on the future.

WASHINGTON — Congress’ excruciating, extraordinary New Year’s Day approval of a compromise averting a prolonged tumble off the fiscal cliff hands President Barack Obama most of the tax boosts on the rich that he campaigned on. It also prevents House Republicans from facing blame for blocking tax cuts for most American households, though most GOP lawmakers parted ways with Speaker John Boehner and opposed the measure. Passage also lays the groundwork for future battles between the two sides over federal spending and debt.

What tax deductions do the rich and famous, as well as all other Americans who earn more than $200,000 per year, claim on their U.S. tax returns, and how much do they claim for each? Using the most recently available tax return data for 2009, we found out and visualized the results into the following chart: