Who should pay taxes?

Bad news for “activists hoping to start another American Revolution” with a series of anti-tax “tea parties” on Tax Day, said Robert Mackey in The New York Times. In a new Gallup poll, most Americans say their federal income tax burden is either “about right” or “too low”; only 46 percent say it’s “too high.” Those are Gallup’s tax-friendliest numbers in 40 years.

It’s easy to be magnanimous about your income tax “burden,” said Ari Fleischer in The Wall Street Journal, when—like at least 40 percent of Americans—you pay no income tax at all. The top 10 percent of earners pay 72.4 percent of all federal income taxes, so to be fair we need a new tax structure in which everyone pays.

The top 10 percent do pay a larger percentage than before, said Justin Fox in Time, but that’s because their share of America’s wealth has risen, to 41.6 percent in 2006, from 36.5 percent a decade earlier. Tax rates have gone down for everyone—maybe “Fleischer’s real complaint” is about “rising income inequality”?

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