Looking at historical data always gives a great sense of perspective (in this case, table 2.1 from the White House site). The graphic below represents the remarkable increase in spread between individuals and corporations when it comes to the burden of funding the federal government. This doesn't include other sources like social security payments, excise taxes and other sources - just plain consumers and businesses, Econ 101.
There are numerous points to take away but we want to highlight a couple:
- the individual curve is roughly parabolic while the corporate curve is roughly linear - painfully obvious but attempting to diagnose acts almost like an economic Rorschach test... give it a shot in the comments, see what comes out!
- the only dips in individual income tax burdens have come during the reign of W - other downturns have merely seen a flattening
- the hump in corporate income tax from 2003-2009 is almost comical as a representation of the effects of a leveraging bubble
-given that 2010 forward numbers are (obviously) forecasts, it is pretty clear that there is some combination of excessive economic optimism from the current administration, knowingly inflating the data a la the Chinese, or some tax hikes even while Obama champions to reduce the tax burden of the bottom 40% of the income range
Edit: ignore the TQ downswing in the mid 70s - some bad data in the federal data set... if you remove that datapoint, it smooths out nicely.
