How U.S. Income Tax Policy Became Mostly About the 1%
While everyone owed the government less in 2019 than in 2001, almost all the action in recent years has been aimed at top earners.
The richest Americans have received tax cuts in the past two decades — along with everyone else.
Photographer: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
There have been some major changes to the U.S. individual income tax code over the past two decades — notably the tax cuts of the early 2000s, their partial rollback in 2012 and the 2017 tax reform/cuts. The net result of them all is maybe not what you’d expect: federal income tax rates fell for every income group since 2001, with the very highest earners seeing the smallest decline (in percentage terms at least) and those with incomes in the 50th to 60th percentiles down the most.
The Internal Revenue Service releases these numbers late every year with an almost two-year delay, so 2019’s are the most recent available. The income percentile groups are those chosen by the agency, with the twist that the IRS simply reports by top 50%, top 40% etc. so I had to do some subtracting and dividing to get the discrete slices shown above.