"Only The Little People Pay Taxes" (Leona Helmsley)

Click the link for an article by David Gilson at Mother Jones that contains a number of, as digby put it at hullabaloo, "infuriating" charts illustrating today's income inequity.

Plutocracy Now! Only Little People Pay Taxes.

"'We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes,' billionaire hotelier Leona Helmsley famously (and allegedly) sniffed. She wasn't entirely correct: The superrich do still pay taxes. The wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers pay 32 percent of all income tax collected by the federal government.

"But the superrich don't pay as much as they used to—and thanks to a combination of tax cuts and preferential tax policies, their tax obligations can be less demanding than the so-called little people's. In fact, the very wealthiest Americans' tax burden has been steadily dropping for years, even as they've enjoyed astounding income growth not seen by the vast majority of Americans."

This chart shows annual average savings as a result of the Bush tax cuts for 2012, by income percentile.  The horizontal lines are at $20,000 increments, with the top line being $140,000. The long bar at the right is the top 0.1% of all U.S. income-earners. The next two categories are the top 0.1 - 1% and the top 1 - 5%. (Lots more interesting charts.)