the folks at the brookings tax policy center helped us put this together. these different groups of popcorn represent your income level. the bigger the bag, the bigger the income level of the group we re talking about. i want to use the popcorn to demonstrate how much of the total pie, how much of the total tax revenue is generated by each group. let s start over here with the little one. these are people who earn less than $30,000 a year. that, by the way, is about 44.8% of all households in the united states. they don t pay a lot in income tax. in fact, generally speaking they get back 4.8%. i m going to put a few kernels into their pot because they are not paying taxes. let s look at another group. this bag represents people who earn between $30 and $100,000 a year. that s about 40% of households in the united states. this group represents a contribution of 18%. 18% of the total personal tax revenues come from here. i m going to put about two handfuls of popcorn in the bow