CAMPOS: Tax burden? What burden?In 2006, households with incomes of $10 million or more paid less than 21 percent of their total income in federal taxes.
How does this happen? Well, consider a really rich couple - Bill and Melinda Gates (in our new Gilded Age, people like the Clintons, who depend on the charity of much richer friends to ferry them about in private jets and the like, can in economic terms be thought of as "middle upper class.")
The Gateses' own approximately 830,000,000 shares of Microsoft stock. The dividend on this stock alone produced $366,577,390 last year. The Gateses paid a 15 percent tax on that. And since they have no salaries, they don't even have to pay the microscopic percentage of their income in Social Security taxes that the Clintons are required to contribute.
We live in a wondrous age, when the nation's richest couple pays half as much tax, in percentage terms, as people who make less than $50,000 a year...