I Read Time's Article About Medical Bills and Now I Feel Compelled to Share Our Story

Note: I asked my wife, Becca, if I could share this. One reason it's so hard to talk about this topic is that medical stories are so personal. But after reading Time's article I could see why these stories matter. They can validate our desire to change a bad system. Hopefully this story does the same. 

Shortly after Becca got pregnant with our second child she began to worry.

It happened after her third prenatal visit, at around 12 weeks, when the midwife couldn't find a heartbeat. The baby was still small, maybe just too small to catch on doppler. Sure enough, an ultrasound showed that everything checked out—the baby was the right size, everything was normal (as normal as it is to grow a human inside a space that grows no bigger than a car battery).

Four weeks passed before her next prenatal visit. This time, still no heartbeat. The midwife was worried, but because the last ultrasound had checked out, she told Becca to come back in two weeks.

Before the two weeks were up, Becca saw blood. She rushed in for another ultrasound. This time, they gave her the worst sort of news: there was no heartbeat. The baby had died.

What happened next, aside from being one of the most heart-rending experiences of our married lives, was a tornado of medical decision-making. The midwife scheduled us that day to see a doctor we'd never met before, one who would (according to them) perform surgery to finish the miscarriage and remove the baby. We met with him and answered a slew of graphic questions, and saw the baby in ultrasound one more time. It was horrific stuff, and not the sort of experience I'd wish on anyone.

And of course, there was the whole matter of payment, which concerned us particularly since our insurance didn't include prenatal coverage.

So we decided to ask about the cost. We waited a full half hour in the doctor's office for the billing representative to call around and find some sort of ball-park estimate for our procedure. Left alone in the room as people chased each other down to give us a number, we wondered to each other: "Isn't this one of the few procedures they actually do at an OB? They don't know off the top of their head, even a ballpark of what this sort of thing costs?" And: "Has no one asked this before?"

Finally we got a number (about $600), scratched it out on a post-it, and went home.

But after we got home, after we had a minute to think about the whole miserable day, we decided we weren't comfortable with a doctor we knew so little about. So we called around and used some of Becca's dad's medical contacts to find a better referral.

Thus began round two of doctor visits, which was more of the same. Answering questions, scheduling our procedure. Becca was relieved to be with a doctor she trusted, but at the same time, since it was a new provider, we didn't know how much it would cost. So we asked the receptionist to give us another estimate.

And again, we waited.

It took so long that they sent us home and told us they'd have someone call us with the details. Hours after our doctor visit, a billing rep called us with a new number: $2,000-$5,000.

It turns out that the $600 figure was just the doctor's fee and didn't include the facility fee, hospital, anesthesiologist, etc.

We had already scheduled the procedure for the next morning at 8:00 am, but when we heard about the full cost we started to seriously second guess whether it was something we really wanted to do. $600 wasn't stressful, but $5,000 was. We eventually decided that we'd call the next morning and postpone the procedure, giving us more time to think about it.

However, Becca was up in pain before dawn, and thankfully the miscarriage occurred naturally at 7:50 am, just ten minutes before we were supposed to be at the hospital. We had avoided all the possible side effects that come with surgery, including possible bankruptcy (who knows whether $5,000 was really the upper limit).

And still, that pregnancy wasn't cheap. Between midwives, ultrasounds, and doctors, it cost us close to $900 to not have a baby.

And yet, I'm grateful that it was only $900. Reading Steven Brill's article from Time and learning about people who were hammered with bills in the tens of thousands further solidifies my gratitude. We had quality care and, as far as bills go, we didn't have it so bad.

But the questions we asked as we waited for estimates are still relevant. In his piece, the central questions Brill asks are "Why exactly are the bills so high?" and "Why does simple lab work done during a few days in a hospital cost more than a car?"

These are the questions that vex me. Every other market gives the customer the cost upfront and lets them compare the price with other sellers. Why does health care have to be a world unto itself on this front? Why does pricing have to be such a stressful issue on top of the emotional and physical stress that accompanies a visit to the hospital?

It doesn't have to be like this, and the article does a good job of illuminating why things are the way they are. It also illuminates who's in the business of driving up medical costs. There's a reason the doctors, nurses, and receptionists don't know what's on their bill sheets: they're not the ones pulling the strings, and they're not typically the ones getting multimillion-dollar paychecks in the industry. If you want to know the how and the why of exorbitant medical billing, look no further than Brill's article. It's certainly better than experiencing it firsthand.

Brill also does a good job explaining how things work in this Daily Show interview:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Coming of Age in the Aughts & the State of the Union

In much wisdom is much grief. - Ecclesiastes

It's better to be naive than jaded. - Jenny Holzer



Coming of Age in the Aughts

I first saw the smoking wounds of the World Trade Center buildings while sitting in a desk, first period,  my senior year of high school. In a word: bewildering. I stayed in the classroom after the bell rang, watching the TV, skyscrapers collapsing on repeat.

One month later, Enron fell—the largest bankruptcy in US history, an implicated president, the destruction of one of the largest accounting firms in the world.

War in Iraq and Afghanistan (the longest war in US history) followed swiftly, and almost every day in college I opened the paper and read about body counts in the Middle East. By now most Americans realizing what a waste those wars were.

Then, just as I'm graduating, the starkest economic collapse since the Great Depression. Bad markets, bad policy, billion-dollar bailouts ensue. The national debt nearly doubled. And a president-elect who said he ran to revamp the system demonstrated—to close out the decade—that although he said he'd like to change the corporate interests, he is in fact entirely in their pocket.

Ah, what a pity party! In reality, it's not so bad. After all, I've got a place to stay, enough to eat.

If I just hadn't followed the news, that siphon of sorrow, I would have no reason to be down about this American life. It's not so bad, I remind myself again. I go to the store, there's food. I have heat during winter. A car, a computer, family.

Nothing to complain about.

The State of the Union

Yes, it's not so bad. I believe that. And yet I can't ignore the events and characters in the backdrop of my life: the back and forth of war, Washington, and Wall Street. It's another world, almost fictional, affecting the psychology of my own.

Sometimes I think I should just ignore those problems entirely. But ignoring them would be the same as ignoring a chronic yet curable disease, wouldn't it?

The phrase I keep repeating to myself—"it's not so bad"—can be tremendously helpful for alleviating psychological pain, but it can also lead diseased people to avoid seeking a cure until it's too late.

You'll forgive me, then, I hope, for expressing what's eating me.

It's this: Part of me (should I call him J1?) wants to divest myself completely from worrying about the state of the union ("Let the union do what it will, I've got a life to live!"), but another part of me (J2?) says that if I don't try to something I will regret it deeply.

That second part of me is increasingly convinced that without substantive reform, conditions in my lifetime will deteriorate to something on par with the Great Depression, or something akin to contemporary Greece.



Here is my internal dialogue:

J1: This is where you start to lose me, riffing on about some global cataclysm and molotov cocktails. You've become a crotchety young man, a paranoid basement blogger, wanting so much to be right about your gloom that you're unable to see that America is still exceptional.

J2: That's what I'm afraid of.

J1: That America is still exceptional?

J2: No, I'm afraid of being crotchety. I don't want to die and have my description on my tombstone read: CROTCHETY. Nothing else.

J1: Well, then, stop worrying about some global meltdown. For one, there's no way you can know that it'll happen. For two, even if you could know, there's nothing you could do to prevent it.

J2: I know. I'm not saying it will happen. There is no way for me to know. We could see new leaders rise who haven't been bought by corporate interests, or we could see tremendous breakthroughs in science and ethics that take humanity into a new era of lasting peace. I'm only saying that the state of the union isn't looking good, a thought heavily colored by coming of age in the aughts and by the 2013 State of the Union address, wherein Obama conclusively proved to me that even in his second term he will do nothing serious about reforming the problem of money in politics or the rule of Wall Street in Washington.

J1: It's too early to tell...

J2: No it's not. Even you know that.

J1: Maybe. But here's what I have to say to you: Don't expect perfection. Don't worry about what you can't control. The aughts weren't as unique in their tragedy as you might think. Wars and economic fiascos face every generation. Don't think that these times are particularly bad.

Conclusion

And that's how it goes. It's better to be naive than jaded, I tell myself.

But one doesn't have to be naive OR jaded. There is another option: to act on knowledge in the hope of fixing the problem. Jaded = inaction. It means complaining at the TV about the problems rather than  trying to do your best to enact change. Educated activism can't be considered jaded, so long as the activist doesn't lose hope that reform is possible. I hope that's where I am now.

If you're interested in what worries me, I've created three posts that summarize a portion of my thoughts.

A timeline of derivatives fiascos

Wall Street and the national debt

Financial crisis reading list

Also, a quote from Charles Ferguson

Like everyone, I'm worried that what little I can do will make no difference—or worse, that writing about these things will merely make people jaded or push them toward paranoia. That's not my intent. Sometimes I worry which is worse: doing something, or doing nothing.

But since I see a chronic yet curable disease,  I want to do something to help heal it.

Why We Should Be Using Nassim Taleb's Neologism, Antifragile

Nassim Taleb has coined a useful word, antifragile—a word that will be permanently lodged in our lexicon. 

Here's how to explain it. When you send a box of glasses in the mail, you write fragile on the box. When you send something robust, you write nothing. So robust isn't the opposite of fragile, as some might suppose. The opposite of fragile is something that gets stronger when it's broken—something antifragile. 

It's a useful word for many reasons, but I'm primarily interested in how it applies to politics because it allows us to bypass many typical (boring) partisan arguments about whether regulation is inherently good or bad. 

Taleb starts with the premise that we will never eliminate volatility (i.e. Black Swan events, or random unforeseen changes). From that premise it follows that we should only pass regulations which will make the economy more antifragile (that is, stronger after the inevitable future volatility).

That may sound simple-minded, but the implications are important. For instance, this rule of thumb would eliminate endlessly complicated regulation like the Dodd-Frank Act (which may eventually sprawl to 30,000 pages of rules—creating loopholes ripe for cronyism), but it would leave open the possibility for simple, market-wide regulations like breaking up the banks, or banning credit-default swaps.

In other words, an antifragile economy is one that implements only regulations that aren't needlessly complex, don't pick winners and losers, and never add hosts of bureaucrats. By this token an antifragile economy also favors diverse, simple, small and medium-sized governments over the concentrated hive of bureaucrats that Washington has become. (Taleb's uses early America and Switzerland as models to follow, and I agree.)

What's more, an antifragile economy is full of entrepreneurs and small/medium-sized businesses instead of megacorporations. We know that entrepreneurs fail frequently, over and over, but each failure makes the future economy stronger as it quickly learns from their/our mistakes (thus, it's antifragile). This is the opposite of "too big to fail," a system where each recurring failure weakens the future economy for years to come, with losses spilling over to unrelated parties (i.e. taxpayers).

So here's a word that breaks the pro-regulation/anti-regulation dichotomy: antifragile. It provides us with a useful rule of thumb, a new and better way to frame debates about the intersection of business and government. It's a word we should start using.
***

Here's a link to an interview with Taleb from a year ago that I've listened to (perhaps embarrassingly?) more than half a dozen times. You can get a feel from the interview about whether you'd like the book (which is divisive and admittedly off-putting to some people).

Why I'm Terrified--and Hopeful!--about America's Financial Future

This morning I discovered a quote (pictured above) from an economics professor at Stanford, Anat Admati, and Martin Hellwig, director of the Max Planck Institute.

It's startling, the way these two professors flatly claim we shouldn't believe that things are better now than they were prior to the recent financial crisis. And while I'm sure people could quibble about details, I couldn't agree more with the quote's general assertions.

I say that because recently I've been involved in a terrifying project—helping out at SwitchYourBank.org. I've read through the reading list (which is by no means enough to qualify me as an expert on the ever-complicated financial crisis), and I've generated the site's content. As a result, I'm strung between a sense of terror and hope.

The conclusion I've come to (unsurprisingly?) is that our financial is fragile, and that the 21st century could repeat the early 20th century, bringing with it a second Great Depression.

But I also have hope. There are enough good and smart people in America that we can solve these problems. We'll just have to drop old ways of thinking.

Old way of thinking:

Republican: "If the government would just get out of the way and not load us with burdensome regulation, then we'd finally see real market growth."

Democrat: "If we'd just had more regulation in the markets, then we would have avoided the financial crisis and we'd be in good economic shape."

To get more specific, the choice seems to have been—speaking generally—between no regulation at all vs. regulation like the 800 pages of the Dodd-Frank Act (an act which could eventually grow to include 30,000 pages of rules).

That old dichotomy needs to go away.

We need government to reign in potential excesses of industries that can negatively affect taxpayers. But we don't need 30,000 pages of rules to do it. Indeed, Matt Taibbi, in his newest take-down of the megabanks, says that the Kansas Fed found that these Wall Street banks are so enormous that "it would take 70,000 examiners to inspect such trillion-dollar banks with the same level of attention normally given to a community bank." What a mess.

I plan to keep writing on this topic. What I mean to say (and I hope it sparks conversation) is that we need regulation but we don't need thousands of pages of it, or thousands of regulators.

Regulation that counters fragility—a limit on bank size, capital requirements, safeties against exotic derivatives—doesn't necessarily require thousands of bureaucrats.

The solution isn't being presented by either political party, but it can be presented by the people. I think (hope) we'll do it.


*If you want to understand what's going on in the financial industry right now this month's cover story from the Atlantic and the latest from Taibbi are two good populist-minded places to start.

Flickr image from othermore

Guns, Tragedy, and Team Politics

Did you know that not everywhere on earth has frequent school shootings?

Here are the number of school shootings since 1999's Columbine tragedy. 

United States: 31

Rest of the world: 14

See the interactive version of the map here.

People talk about American exceptionalism as though it's always a good thing, but on this issue we're exceptional in the most twisted way possible, and we had better reform quickly. The frequency of the shootings is on the rise.

What's our problem?

People say that if we were just nicer to shy people, just said "hi" more frequently, then these killers wouldn't do what they've done. My response to that is: Look at Russia on the map above. You think Russia's a land of remarkably happy, smiley teenagers? I haven't been there, but I have my doubts.

Of course, being nicer would help. I'm only claiming that niceness alone won't solve our problem.

To be honest, I don't know what exactly will solve our problem.

But I do know that team politics isn't helping. In reaction to these tragedies, people choose a political team, and then they play the "either/or" game, just like sports teaches them to do. There's little nuance in sports, after all. It's one team vs. another, with the fans deciding before the game who to cheer and who to boo.

Likewise after every major tragedy, people line up according to their pre-chosen alliances.

"The problem isn't a lack of gun control; it's the crazy news coverage."

"The problem isn't the crazy news coverage; it's Hollywood."

"The problem isn't Hollywood; it's video games."

"The problem isn't video games; it's lack of mental health facilities."

"The problem isn't a lack of mental health facilities; it's American culture."

"The problem isn't American culture; it's a lack of gun control."

Why does the debate have to be a matter of either/or? Why can't the starting point be: There's good reason to believe that each of these things is playing a role in our problem, and I'm willing to judge the importance of each point according to the evidence I find rather than according to the team I belong to.

To solve our problem, I would start by looking at the data in the map above and then finding what is different about the United States. Do we have more sensational news coverage? Do we have more relaxed gun laws? Is our mental health coverage worse? 

I'd guess the answer to most of those questions is: Yes.

So I'm willing to fight passionately for all of the above. Got a good idea for how to get the news to tone things down? Let's try it. Got a good list of ways to improve mental health facilities? I'll fight for it. Know some ways to improve gun laws? Yes!

Unfortunately, what happens too often is that the teams end up canceling each other out. So we don't get mental health reform or gun control reform, and when the next school shooting happens we're still saddened, but less surprised.

Why not break from the "either/or" game and say something like, "I think that gun control is the primary issue, but I'm willing to join you in the fight for mental health reform, too"?

This section from INSIDE JOB keeps playing in my head as Obama gears up for a second term

Have you seen Inside Job yet? I recommend it. 

Though it waxes sensational at times, overlooks Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and neglects to critically analyze Barney Frank and George Soros, it's an amazing film.

Lots of interviews with smart people, plus an astonishing narrative. I've seen it 4 times.

Here's the section that talks about appointments in Obama's first term.

***

NARRATOR: After taking office, President Obama spoke of the need to reform the financial industry.

BARACK OBAMA: We want a systemic-risk regulator; increased capital requirements. We need a consumer financial protection agency; we need to change Wall Street’s culture.

NARRATOR: But when finally enacted in mid-2010, the administration’s financial reforms were weak; and in some critical areas, including the rating agencies, lobbying, and compensation, nothing significant was even proposed.

ROBERT GNAIZDA: Addressing Obama and, quote, regulatory reform: my response, if it was one word, would be: Ha!

There’s very little reform.

CHARLES FERGUSON: How come?

ROBERT GNAIZDA: It’s a Wall Street government.

NARRATOR: Obama chose Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary. Geithner was the president of the New York Federal Reserve during the crisis, and one of the key players in the decision to pay Goldman Sachs 100 cents on the dollar for its bets against mortgages.

ELIOT SPITZER: When Tim Geithner was testifying to be confirmed as Treasury secretary, he said, I have never been a regulator. Now that said to me, he did not understand his job as president of the New York Fed.

{Timothy Geithner declined to be interviewed for this film.}

NARRATOR: The new president of the New York Fed is William C. Dudley, the former chief economist of Goldman Sachs, whose paper with Glenn Hubbard praised derivatives.

Geithner’s chief of staff is Mark Paterson, a former lobbyist for Goldman; and one of the senior advisors is Lewis Sachs, who oversaw Tricadia, a company heavily involved in betting against the mortgage securities it was selling.

To head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Obama picked Gary Gensler, a former Goldman Sachs executive who had helped ban the regulation of derivatives.

To run the Securities and Exchange Commission, Obama picked Mary Shapiro, the former CEO of FINRA, the investment-banking industry’s self-regulation body.

Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, made 320,000 dollars serving on the board of Freddie Mac.

Both Martin Feldstein and Laura Tyson are members of Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board. And Obama’s chief economic advisor is Larry Summers.

ELIOT SPITZER: The most senior economic advisors are the very people who were there, who built the structure.

WILLEM BUITER: When it was clear that Summers and Geithner were going to play major roles as advisors; first, uh, I knew this was going to be status quo.

NARRATOR: The Obama administration resisted regulation of bank compensation, even as foreign leaders took action.

***

This section of the screenplay explains the reason I created a petition, which is (slowly) gaining traction, on the WH petition page. You can sign it here, if you'd like.


Full screenplay here. Official site here.

You can borrow the DVD from me anytime, or you can look it up on Vimeo. However, I'm not sure whether the producer, Sony Classics, endorses the fact that it's on Vimeo, so I won't link to it.

A Little Break from Politics: Guster and the Film Post Collective

I was such a fan of Guster in high school, so struck by the upbeat strangeness of the band, that I founded an official club—The Guster and Me Society—with my good friend, Drew. We did a few service projects and made T-shirts, but most importantly we got our picture in the yearbook.



Whose signatures are on the page, you might ask? Guster's, of course. We had them sign our yearbooks when we went as a club to their summer concert, and then the band wrote a nice ditty about us on their website:

Once again, Utah's crowd blew us away with their energy. How is that this happens every tour? Mormons in the audience, Jews on stage, etc... I don't get it. It might have something to do with Andrew Vernon, who had us sign his yearbook after the show -- right next to the "Guster and Me" club he started at his high school in Salt Lake City.

After signing it, we asked Drew to email us a picture of it, so we could point out the number of people in the Chess Club versus the number of members in the Guster and Me Society. And so we could unleash our newest slogan:

Guster -- More Popular than Chess... in Utah.

Haha!

I'd mostly forgotten about Guster simply because their 4th and 5th albums didn't strike me as much as the first three had. But then I saw this music video from my brother-in-law's website Film Post Collective.

It's from the band's 6th album Easy Wonderful, and I don't know how I missed seeing it before. What a melodic, joyous chorus! Plus, paint on the guitar and face!

Anyway, the video just sparked a bit of nostalgia.

Speaking of nostalgia, here's another clip I found on Film Post Collective. This is the trailer for Back to the Future, a movie that taught me several swear words, two of which I started saying regularly around friends until one of my friend's older brothers informed that I was swearing, at which point I ran home and started bawling on the stairs because I felt so guilty.

Funny trailer:


Check out Film Post Collective for more clips, plus commentary on recent films.

15 Tax Charts You Should Be Acquainted with. Also, If You Know of Others, I'd Love to See Them.

This post is somewhat in conjunction with my last post, which is about capital gains tax cuts.

A couple of days ago a friend posted a chart about the top US marginal tax rate (see below). I like the chart, but I soon realized it doesn't present a full picture. This finding led me to question several other common assumptions about the tax code.

I compiled this list because I couldn't find a single source that answered these particular questions, questions that I find essential to the debates about the tax code.

Here's that chart I was talking about.

Q. The purpose of this chart is to imply that raising the top marginal tax rate back to 39.6% wouldn't be a big deal, right?

A. Right. 

Q. So why not raise the rate back to 91%? It seems like the economic growth in the 1950s was great. If we raised it again to 91%, would we have the equivalent of what was happening in the 50s?

A. Not quite. Today, the top marginal tax rate affects a wider group—those making over $397,000. In the 50s the top bracket only affected those who made the equivalent of over $2.3M (see below).

This means that someone who made the equivalent of $3M in 1955 would have only been taxed 91% on the portion that was above $2.3M, but someone making $3M today would be tax 91% on everything above $397,000. That's an enormous difference—the difference between making $700,000 and $2.4M a year (excluding all other taxes, credits, deductions, etc.).

So things are not as simple as the graph above lets on because the income level for the top bracket have shifted many times—and often dramatically!

Still, the differences between tax brackets from 1993 to 2011 aren't very large, so if the top marginal rate were to rise back to 1993 levels, it would be nearly equivalent to what it was then.

Q. Okay, I see. There's something else I'm wondering about: The chart above only focuses on rates, which is totally different from what people actually paid (taking into account all the shifting tax credits and deductions). No one really paid 91%, right?

A. I think that's right. I had a hard time finding a chart I could trust on this one. If anyone knows where to find the amount each bracket actually paid, I would love to see it.

Until then, here is this chart that shows the effective rate—including payroll, estate, and other taxes—for each segment of income distribution.

Q. So according to this chart, nobody had an effective rate of 91%. 

A. Right, remember the 91% just referred to the marginal rate—the rate that the income above a certain threshold is taxed. This chart shows the effective rate.

Also, this chart gets around the problem about shifting tax brackets by splitting everything according to segments of income distribution (not according to arbitrary brackets).

Q. What exactly is meant by the Bush tax cuts?

A. This.



Q. Since Obama continued these cuts, why aren't they now called the Obama tax cuts?

A. Good question.

Q. I hear Republicans say that it won't matter if we raise taxes because tax revenues average around 20% pretty much no matter what we do. They show charts like this one.



A. It's true. Even though tax rates have changed pretty dramatically 1945-2010, revenue as a percent of GDP hasn't changed much. I don't know all the reasons for this (though I suspect it has to do with certain tax cuts in certain years, or certain recessions, or both), but I don't buy that getting above 20% would be impossible for the US. After all, look at where the US lands on this chart.



Most of these countries get far more revenue as a percent of GDP than the US does. There are tradeoffs for this, obviously, but it certainly wouldn't be impossible for the US to get more tax revenue if it wanted to.


(And if we want to continue to expand our warfare/welfare state, we probably will need to eventually raise rates to European levels.)


(WSJ)



Q. How much does the lowest income bracket pay in taxes?

A. It depends on how you break it down. Here are a few key data points that emphasize just how much the richest actually end up paying.

But these charts don't factor in all taxes—sales tax, gasoline tax, payroll tax. When you factor those things in, the share each bracket pays is fairly close to the share each bracket earns.



And the effective tax totals for each bracket aren't quite so unequal as the earlier charts seem to indicate. 

Particularly when you factor in income inequality.

Q. Okay, okay. Just one more question. Why does any of this matter?

A. There are several reasons, but the biggest reason is that the long-term health of the United States depends on its citizens really understanding this issue. Right now we're a little confused:



And we're heading into a strange place:

We're fooling ourselves if we think we can keep heading in this direction.

 Q. Okay, sorry—I have one more question. What are we supposed to do?

A. Well, mathematically speaking, the problem isn't tough. We need to cut warfare and welfare spending, and raise tax rates across the board, for everyone. That's it. Do it over a ten year period, but do it.

The problem is that team politics—the constant left vs. right chatter—will never allow us to seriously move forward on simple mathematical necessities.

But we can gather the best data we can find, create a better dialogue about these issues, and then hope for the best.



Sources:

How we pay taxes: 11 charts
Who pays taxes in America
Income tax in the US
Who pays taxes 2012
TaxFoundation.org
History of tax rates
Another excellent inequality study

Dear Government: Please Hurry Up and Compromise Because If You Don't This Country is Screwed

Added! A chart suggestion from Dallin in the comments section, showing the share of people paying taxes by age. This is from March 2008, and while things certainly looked different through the recession, it shows that many of the people who don't pay federal income taxes are young or old.