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Here's a series of charts that show what percentage of income taxes are paid by each group (top 1%, 5%, 10%, etc) and their overall share of total income. As you can see the top 1% earn about 20% of total income but pay 40% of all income taxes.

http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/top10-percent-income-e...

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Here is a better series of charts that doesn't just look at federal taxes, but instead the whole tax burden:

See: http://ctj.org/ctjreports/2012/04/who_pays_taxes_in_america....

The total tax burden is pretty flat in the top 40%, and actually goes down marginally from top 5% to top 1% (and probably to top 0.1% if that were shown on the chart). The burden on the middle 20% at 25.2% isn't dramatically lower than the burden on the top 1% at 29.0%, but the burden on the bottom 20% is lower at 17.4%.

In all it's pretty fair if you ask me.

Yeah, this is a much more complete picture. Not including payroll and state taxes gives very misleading results.

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