What is Tax Fairness?

I caught the last part of John Stossel's Popularly Reported Misconceptions last night. I missed the The Rich Don't Pay Their Fair Share of Taxes segment, but Stossel says here:

the richest 1 percent of taxpayers already pay 34 percent of all income taxes.

And

the top 1 percent of Americans — those who earn more than about $300,000 a year — pay 34 percent, more than a third of all income taxes, and the top 5 percent, those making over $125,000, pay more than half.

No references. Anger Management says,

the richest one percent pay about 37% of all taxes while earning only 21% of all income covered under the income tax

citing Rush Limbaugh, among others. Limbaugh says:

There is new data for 2001. The share of total income taxes paid by the top 1% fell to 33.89% from 37.42% in 2000. This is mainly because their income share (not just wages) fell from 20.81% to 17.53%. However, their average tax rate actually rose slightly from 27.45% to 27.50%.

That backs up Stossel. Limbaugh goes on:

Top 5% pay 53.25% of all income taxes (Down from 2000 figure: 56.47%). The top 10% pay 64.89% (Down from 2000 figure: 67.33%). The top 25% pay 82.9% (Down from 2000 figure: 84.01%). The top 50% pay 96.03% (Down from 2000 figure: 96.09%). The bottom 50%? They pay a paltry 3.97% of all income taxes. The top 1% is paying more than ten times the federal income taxes than the bottom 50%!

(His italics.) He links to the IRS data (for those of us who don't have Excel), and provides an html version, which backs up the assertion that the top 1% pay 37%, and the top 5% pay 56%.

Meanwhile, Donald Luskin pointed out in September that in tax-year 2001

the aggregate income of the top 1% of taxpayers fell by $243 billion, reducing their share of total income from 20.8% to 17.5%. In other words, the rich got poorer.

And since the rich pay most of the taxes around here, overall tax receipts fell dramatically in 2001 -- and are estimated in the federal budgeting process to keep on falling in 2002 and 2003 -- hence the forecasted deficits.

(Not to mention increased gov't spending.) He cites Bruce Bartlett; apparently their fall income was due to the stock market collapse and the recession.

Luskin's link to Bartlett is dead; he's apparently with the National Center for Policy Analysis, which is a disappointing site with lots of dead links.