The rich are like you and me -- but so much richer

NPR's Planet Money posts some IRS data that allows us to compare the 400 richest Americans' income and tax payment:

"The Top 400 are considerably more talented than the rest of us," writes Matt Yglesias. "And this decline in their tax rates has created exciting new incentives for them to apply their talents. And that, in turn, is why the 2000s were a so much more economically successful decade than the 1990s, not just for the Top 400 but for the rest of us as well. Thanks to their skyrocketing incomes and falling tax rates, we’re currently all enjoying the fruits of prosperity, rapid growth and low unemployment."

I'd only add that while it's true that we can't solve all our fiscal problems by taxing the rich, we can solve more of them than people realize, as inequality has made the rich a lot richer than people realize. In 2007, the top 1 percent of households accounted for 23.5 percent of the nation's income. That is to say, for every dollar of income in America, the top 1 percent got about a quarter and the rest of us split the other 76 cents.

