Taxes and class warfare

Doing my taxes (yep another procrastinator) and getting the little Tea-bagger (talk about darker side!) inside me a bit angry.  Just read this week David Cay Johnston's great piece for the Willamette Week debunking the myths about taxes (e.g. the rich pay most of the taxes, but not really, just most of the income tax, and so on).  He shows that the worker making the median wage pays around 23% of his/her income as compared to almost 19% for the 400 wealthiest Americans (See Table below).

If that does not lend support to Obama's proposal to allow the top rate to increase again to 39.6%, I don't know what does.  The graph below (via thruth&politics) shows the top marginal tax rate over time.

We do not need to go back to the good old times of that Socialist, Eisenhower, when marginal tax rates where 91%, but it would certainly help to raise taxes on the rich, if you are really concerned about public debt.  It seems that class warfare wasn't that bad!