As many of you know, I often guest on AOL Political Machine blogger Tommy Christopher‘s Blog Talk Radio program Unusable Signal. Tommy has been making a claim for a while now that the rich benefit disproportionately from the government. He has made this claim yet again in a blog entitled “I’m Tommy the Elitist”.Therefore he says that they should pay more in taxes, their “fair share”. Not only does Tommy not cite one piece of evidence, there is mounting evidence to the contrary. That is, the rich are punished disproportionately by government.

Scott Hodge of the Tax Foundation asks “Why Is $1 Trillion In Distribution Not Enough?”. He reproduces the following chart from an earlier Tax Foundation study.

As you can see, the quintile of income earners only receive $0.32 for every dollar they pay in federal income taxes. On the other hand, the bottom quintile receives a whopping $14.67 for every dollar they pay in federal income taxes.

As I pointed out the other day, those earning under $200,000 pay only 9.7% of their incomes while those earning over $200,000 pay 21.8%, 2.25 times more than those under $200,000.

Who is benefiting from the government disproportionately here? It certainly isn’t the rich.

Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air points to a Tax Founation study of the 2005 federal income tax returns as he takes Tommy to task over this same topic. (If I can find a newer study, I’ll pass that one on.) The rich have been paying their “fair share” and then some. They generated this table (emphasis added):

The top 5% (or the top two income tax brackets) pay 59.67% of the federal tax bill while only earning 35.75% of the AGI. Those numbers represent the top income earners paying 23.92% more than their “fair share”.

Sorry Tommy:

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