SomeOtherGuy said...
In our current tax system it looks nothing like that. If you think the wealthiest people pay half the tax and we're all benefiting from that then you're dreaming. The likes of Clive Palmer and Gina Rinehardt probably pay bugger all tax.
Firstly, let me deal with your last point first... he he he... That's a Kevin Ruddism... Clive and Gina - did you hear this on Today Tonight, A Current Affair or 2GB? What ever the case, they are extreme outliers in the population. I have no idea of the tax affairs of these two people, and wouldn't pretend to. It's not fair

to only name them though, what about Tinks and Twig

If you sample the distribution at six points, based on the salary bands, and the beers for these six people cost $100 (assume 2 beers each, unless you live in Perth, or drink at the Belgian Beer Cafe


), the breakdown from our tax system based on percentage of tax paid would look like:
$0 ($0)
$6,000 ($0)
$37,000 ($12)
$80,000 ($21)
$180,000 ($28)
$1,000,000 ($39)
If you look at absolute amount of tax paid, it would look like:
$0 ($0)
$6,000 ($0)
$37,000 ($1)
$80,000 ($3)
$180,000 ($11)
$1,000,000 ($85)
Perhaps you are trying to say that it is not relevant to sample the distribution this way, and we need to look at tax contribution based on the whole distribution. Sounds easy... but, I can only find mean salary data, nothing on the standard deviation, variance or coefficient of variance... SHAME...
What is likely, is that the distribution will be close to normal (BTW, my favourite charts are
PIE charts):
So, it is likely there are a greater number of contibutors around the mean, and thus the total tax take from these individuals (when considered as a whole) is not well represented by six point samples along the entire distribution.