Blue Va Regurgitates A Bogus Number.

"There are three kinds of lies:
Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
-Benjamin Disraeli

Benjamin Disraeli

USA today is comparing apples and oranges.

They take the total income of all employees and divide it by the total of all employees. That sounds fair, except that 50% of the employed do not pay taxes.
The real number would be to take the total amount of income earned by all federal taxpayers, divided by the number of people who in fact pay federal income tax.

To Blue Va and Michael Ettlinger, start thinking instead of just regurgitating Lefty talking points. The number is not a legitimate measure of anything substantial. It is a bogus # created by a statistician. When 50% of the people don't pay any federal income taxes, stating that income, property, sales and other taxes — consumed 9.2% of all personal income in 2009, the lowest rate since 1950, doesn't mean much to the 50% who actually pay federal taxes.

That 9.2% is paid by a far smaller number of people than the total number of people employed. If the number is 9.2% of all personal income of those employed, as opposed to 9.2% of those who actually pay federal income taxes, we are talking about totally different percentage of each taxpayers individual tax rate. Since there are about 140 Million employed vs approximately 70 Million federal taxpayers, that 9.2% is far less than what each individual taxpayer actually pays.