We can take a look at corporate tax revenue separately...I've not dug into those figures as deeply. But in terms of personal income taxes there is simply no way you can tax the rich enough to come close to dealing with the deficit. My source...IRS data of actual tax returns. The most recent tax year with detailed information available was 2009.
Source: http://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats---Individual-Statistical-Tables-by-Size-of-Adjusted-Gross-Income
The IRS data does not break out returns above $250K (which is roughly that top 2%), so let's take returns with taxable income above $200K.
> Number of returns in that category in 2009: 723,191
> Total taxable income from those returns: $903.1 billion
> The portion from returns in excess of $200K: $758.4 billion
> Of that, the portion not from capital gains: about $535 billion
> Tax collected on those dollars at a 34% rate: $182 billion
> Additional tax collected at a new 39% rate: $27 billion. Really no impact on the deficit.
And if you raised the income tax rate on those dollars to 100%?
> Additional tax collected at 100% rate: $354 billion, or 32% of last year's annual deficit. Pretty good chance this is not something you could do year after year.
Quick thoughts on corporate taxes...according to IRS data corporations paid $175 billion in taxes in 2011. ThinkProgress says that was 12.1% of profits on activities within the US.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2012/02/03/418171/corporate-taxes-40-year-low/
Bump that effective rate to 16% and you bring in about $56 billion more. A rate of 35% means $331 million more taxes each year.
So a roughly tripling of the effective tax rate on corporations, plus a 100% rate in income above $200K...and you raise $685 billion in new taxes. That's not paying off the debt in 10 years, it's covering 78% of last year's annual deficit.
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