Wednesday is Tax Day in America, and if you're wondering how much the government is collecting from your economic peers and those in higher and lower income brackets, the Brookings Institution has you covered. In the video below, David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, uses Legos to quantify how much each quintile of taxpayers earns, how much they send to Uncle Sam, and how much they have left over.
America's progressive tax system shrinks the gap between the wealthy and the poor "some," Wessel says, "but even after taxes, the distribution of income in the United States remains substantially unequal." Whether or not you think it fair that the IRS takes 70 Legos from people in the richest 1 percent of the population but only one thin brick from the bottom 20 percent, this is a pretty helpful way to visualize a fairly dry data set with important policy implications. Watch below. —Peter Weber
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