Are our taxes progressive?

I used to read Lane Kenworthy’s Consider the Evidence blog, but I stopped when he started to write more elsewhere than on his blog.  It was always good, well-researched, and had lots of nice graphs.

In January, he had a short post called “How Progressive are our Taxes?“  As I’ve said before, it’s misleading to look at only federal tax rates since our tax collection is decentralized across states, counties, and cities.  Here is the graph he produces using CBO and Tax Foundation data:

The main caveat is that quintiles are pretty rough guides to any measurements, especially income in America.  The top one percent definitely faces a progressive tax, and the bottom percentages face net zero or negative taxes.  Overall, the point is that we have a nearly proportional tax system.