Apart from SS, the "rich" pay the vast majority of income taxes in the US. That's not to say that all of the rich people pay taxes - there's a lot of folks who buy Munis and the like for tax avoidance (supposedly reducing the costs of various govt projects) and then there are the folks who have managed their estates so they'll never be taxed (including Warren "the inheritance tax should be higher" Buffet).

Yes - it's reasonable to exclude SS. SS is essentially a bad forced savings account. However, SS is progressive in that the less you contributed, the better your return. For folks who pay the max, it's a horrible deal. Both "contributions" and benefits are capped so Perot doesn't get $1M/month.

The rich pay a lower fraction of their income in consumption taxes than the poor, but that's because they consume a smaller fraction of their income and they don't consume as much "sin". (Most consumption taxes exempt food, which is a larger fraction of poor people's income, but poor people also spend more of their money on tobacco and alcohol.)

time_management: "It's paying high taxes to support Bush's war and tax cuts for the rich that I have a problem with."

mynameishere: "Paying high taxes to support tax cuts for the rich?"

Hexstream: "If the rich pay less taxes then the non-rich probably pay more..."

I meant that if the rich get new tax cuts, thus paying less taxes, and the government wants the same amount of taxes overall, then the non-rich necessarily have to pay more to compensate the loss incurred.