Beautiful innit? But it reveals just how low current taxes are in historical context, especially for the very wealthy. The explanation from the creator, Stephen von Worley:
That’s a line for every year from 1913 onward, sized and colored by the tax burden: the amount of tax due relative to the long-term average at each income level. Above-average burdens appear thick and red and below-average thin and blue. We adjusted everything for inflation to ensure an apples-to-apples comparison, with the caveat that the effects of Social Security, Medicare, and other taxes are not included. The underlying data comes from The Tax Foundation, IRS, and Bureau of Labor Statistics, and is the same information we used in last year’s bracket graph, updated for 2011.
In a time of massive debt, it seems to me that some revenue increases have to be part of the equation. Some of that blue needs to redden.