[harryh]

The fact is that most Americans pay virtually no federal income tax,

This is not really true. Especially when you also look at payroll taxes which are, for all intents and purposes, income taxes.

When I...made the median income level for the state I was living in at the time, I still paid no tax (outside of SALT) and got a return larger than what I paid in.

This is highly unlikely to be true. I'm sure you remember it this way but without supporting data it is very hard to believe.

[alexasmyths]

Only about 1/2 of Americans at any given time work (very roughly - think kids, elderly etc.) so most Americans don't pay tax is technically kind of correct, but not very meaningful at all in any discussion.

[harryh]

Lots of people that aren't working do pay taxes though. Social Security benefits, for example, are taxable in a lot of cases.

[death_and_taxes]

Using 2015 as a reference, of the people that work in the US (represented by 141,204,625 tax returns), the top 50% paid 97.17% of all federal income taxes. The statement that about half of Americans don't pay federal income taxes is only for those that are filing taxes (and therefore probably working), so if you want to include the non-working, it's more like 75% of Americans don't pay income taxes. Here is the data from the IRS, look at the last table cell at the bottom all the way on the right. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/15in03etr.xls