Who pays taxes? Employees replace corporations in big shift over past decades

"We should not be so mad at Apple for doing what the law allows. We should be mad that the law allows Apple and other companies to keep billions of dollars of cash offshore and out of the government coffers, where it could be helping the unemployed and our crumbling infrastructure and such. Another thing we can get mad about is how the "corporate tax reform" that Cook and other corporate leaders are always banging on about will actually serve to make it so companies pay even less in taxes than they do now."

The 1 Chart That Reveals Just How Grossly Unfair The U.S. Tax System Has Become
Mark Gongloff
huffingtonpost.com
05/22/2013 Updated: 05/23/2013

Click to enlarge.

Notice the beige stripe that is shrinking steadily? That stripe is the percentage corporate taxes contribute to total federal revenue. And notice the olive-green stripe that has swollen to be larger than the beige stripe used to be? That is the contribution of payroll taxes to federal revenue.

What this shows is how dramatically corporate tax contributions have shrunk in the past several decades, and how our personal taxes have risen to fill the gap. Payroll taxes now make up 35 percent of all federal government tax receipts, up from 11 percent in 1950. Corporate income taxes, meanwhile, now make up less than 10 percent of federal revenue, down from about 26 percent in 1950...

Assuming companies pay half of the payroll taxes in this chart, the total tax burden for individual Americans is ...about 63 percent of total federal revenue...that is up from about 45 percent in 1950.