11 charts that explain taxes in America

Payroll taxes — taxes on wages for Social Security and Medicare — account for almost as much tax revenue as the individual income tax does. Some payroll taxes are typically paid by employers, but economists agree they end up coming out of money employees would have earned.

Image credit: Tax Policy Center

As Dylan Matthews wrote for Vox, "A report from the Joint Committee on Taxation found that most Americans (65.4 percent of filers) pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes. It's only once you start looking at folks making over $200,000 a year that most people are paying more in income taxes. Because so much of US social policy is structured as tax credits, a lot of people get more money back from income taxes than they put in ... but they still, on net, contribute billions to the federal government every year."

Image credit: Dylan Matthews/Vox

If you look at all the taxes people pay — federal, state and local income taxes, and payroll taxes — the rich don't actually pay that much more than anyone else. This chart shows that while the bottom 60 percent of earners pay a slightly smaller share of all taxes than their share of income, and the top 20 percent pay a slightly bigger share of taxes, there's no tremendous discrepancy. For more on this, see Dylan Matthews's post: "Think the poor don't pay taxes? This chart proves you very wrong."

Image credit: Citizens for Tax Justice

Historically, the US had a lot of tax brackets — ensuring that the very rich paid a higher tax rate than the upper middle class. As this chart (from an interactive by Vox's Alvin Chang) shows, Ronald Reagan dramatically reduced the number of brackets, especially at the very top. Now someone making $416,000 a year pays the same tax rate as someone making millions. "Generally, politicians want to reduce the number of brackets because they believe it will simplify the tax code," Chang writes. "That said, tax brackets are among the easiest parts of the tax code, thanks to modern software and, well, math." Check out "100 years of tax brackets, in one chart" to learn more.

Image credit: Alvin Chang/Vox

This tax calculator from Vox's Alvin Chang lets you see how much you'd be paying in taxes under the presidential administration of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz, or Donald Trump. The takeaway: Clinton wants to keep things mostly the same; Sanders wants to raise taxes on nearly all households, in exchange for much more expansive government services; and Cruz and Trump want to drastically reduce taxes on everyone — but cut the taxes on the wealthiest Americans the most.

If you're surprised by how high your taxes would be under any of the candidates, check out the explanation Chang got from Tax Policy Center director Len Burman.

Image credit: Alvin Chang/Vox

A lot of middle-class Americans say they don't use any "government programs." But if you ask them about specific programs — especially middle-class tax breaks, like the mortgage interest deduction — it turns out they do. This chart goes policy by policy, and shows what percentage of people who used that policy originally said they "didn't use any government programs."

The problem here is that people don't think of it as a "government program" when the government takes less from you in taxes — they think of "welfare" as the government giving people money or benefits like food stamps. But the tax code is totally an instrument of social policy — it's a way for politicians to reward behavior they want to encourage and punish behavior they want to discourage, without getting into fights over "welfare."

Image credit: Suzanne Mettler/Perspectives on Politics