The oh-so important and serious fellows over at Powerline wrote an essay about taxes. I quote their conclusion:
In other words, the top 10 percent of tax filers were responsible for two of every three dollars paid in income taxes in 1999, while the bottom half of all those who file tax returns paid essentially no income taxes.
For the bottom half of tax filers who receive hundreds of billions of dollars in government benefits but pay essentially no income taxes, political debate about taxation has little personal meaning except insofar as they may aspire to earn higher incomes in the future.
Many Americans would see the present system of federal income taxes to be unfair if they knew the facts. These facts, however, are almost never reported in the mainstream media. The so-called progressivity of the federal income tax system is both fundamentally unfair and inconsistent with the principle of equal rights that underlies the Constitution.
I.E. more rich people complaining about the fact that it is not effective to tax poor people, as I write in my essay Progressive Taxation, from which I quote:
Bottom line: we should tax progressively because it is fair. It puts most of the cost on those who have benefited most and who will be impacted by it least. It is a tactic to fuel economic growth by turning people who are tax burdens into people who are tax payers. Any strategy which puts more of the tax burden on the poor ultimately hurts the rich, too, because we hobble our biggest potential of economic growth.
I agree with their facts — the rich pay more of the taxes than the not-rich. I personally don’t think this is at all unfair. But even if you agree with them that it is unfair, what is the solution? They do not prescribe a solution, but the math is pretty straightforward — to make the system “fair” you’d have to significantly raise taxes on everyone but the rich. The alternative is, of course, slashing spending to the point that we have a burnt out shell of a government.
Why are people who have better lifestyles than 99.999% of the people that have ever lived always bitching about paying taxes? They should be proud of their additional contribution and instead they bitch. Shut up you rich bastards. There is nothing wrong here.
lolife 
One other comment about this essay. You can see from the bit I quoted that they are dividing people into three groups, the top 10%, the bottom 50% and implicitly the 40% in the middle. The top 10% they say pay 2 out of 3 of the tax dollars and the bottom 50% pay “essentially no income taxes”. Thus the middle 40% pays 1 out of 3 tax dollars.
Thus, the middle class, according to these guys, pays their fair share. They make up about 1/3 of the people and they pay about 1/3 of the income taxes. So the right-wingers agree that the middle class is doing their share. Good! That is a switch. They are complaining because the very richest people in this country have to pay for the poorest people in this country. By their own numbers, this top 10% makes half of all the income. Half the income goes to 10% of the people. How can those people possibly be claiming they have an unfair deal?
If we had 10 people and $100, 1 person would have $45, 4 people $11 and 5 people $2.50. And it’s the person with $45 that is complaining about unfairness.
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