Bruce Bartlett on who doesn't pay income taxes

Bruce Bartlett has a very interesting piece over at Economix about who doesn't pay income taxes.  Mr. Bartlett says:

During the 1990s, about 24 percent of filers had no income tax liability, but this number took a big jump during the George W. Bush administration as Republicans added a large child credit to the tax code. The percentage of filers with no income tax liability rose to 36.3 percent in 2008, from 25.2 percent in 2000.

Then he comments on new 2011 data from the Tax Policy Center (see here) that shows most filers in the bottom quintile of the income distribution (people with incomes below  $16,812) do not pay federal income taxes, but, interestingly enough, there are significant numbers of filers in the upper income distribution (for example, with incomes above $211,000) that did not pay federal income taxes either.  The table (again, here) from the Tax Policy Center is given below (click on table to enlarge).

Mr. Bartlett does as much as anybody I know to bring empirical data to the opinion dominated discussion of taxes.