Moving from Judd Gregg's dubious tax math to Robert Reich's dubious tax language

gee, after one good post on taxes, you go back to repeating GOP talking points.

When were talking about taxes, we're talking about TAXES, and not how those taxes are spent. "Payroll" taxes are regressive, period. It does not matter how the money is spent -- no one analyses law enforcement budgets to see who benefits most from law enforcement (the wealthy), or the Pentagon budget to see whose assets are being protected with by the defense establishment (the wealthy have a lot more to lose if we are attacked/invaded). And its grossly intellectually dishonest to switch from "the income tax structure" to benefit levels for Medicare and Social Security. (and since wealthy people live longer than poor people, its dishonest to discuss benefit levels in the way its done here; rather one needs to look at the aggregate payout to poor & middle class vs wealthy people over their lifetimes.)

Moreover, the whole article is dishonest in that it looks at tax structures, rather than taxes as a percentage of income, and completely ignores the gas tax and other federal taxes and "fees" as well as the tax burden that is passed on to consumers by corporations.

As for state and local taxation, those are utterly regressive -- while state income taxes have some progressive elements, sales, excise, and real estate taxes make up a far higher percentage (47.7%) of individual taxes paid to states than do individual income taxes (35.4%)(see http://www.taxadmin.org/fta/rate/07taxdis.html) -- and the regressive nature of local taxation is even worse.

One other thing...
Considering the changes that have been made to the tax code since FY 1993, there is simply no way that any study of "who pays what taxes" done in 1994 has any relevance to a discussion of current tax burdens. (I mean, I found the 2007 table without any problem at all....)

Some help on the progressivity of state and local taxation is available in a report from the Tax Foundation: http://www.taxfoundation.org/publications/show/2282.html. See also the post and comments at http://lanekenworthy.net/2009/01/05/how-progressive-are-our-taxes/.

The short answer: State and local taxes are regressive, so they reduce the progressivity of the tax system. Are taxes nevertheless progressive overall? If you include government transfers as income in calculating effective tax rates (taxes paid divided by income), yes. If you don't include transfers, the tax system is essentially flat; effective rates are similar across the income spectrum.

The state and local tax burden is about half the federal tax burden, so state and local taxes would have to be mighty regressive to outweigh the progressivity of the federal tax system.
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on whom?
especially among those in the lower income brackets who pay little or no federal income tax, the burden of state and local taxes far exceeds their federal tax burden.
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according to the Tax Policy Center (a joint effort of the Brookings Institute and the Brookings Institute)

Individual income taxes account for a relatively small share of state and local revenue: across all states, their contribution to general revenue rose from a low of 9.1 percent in 1972 to a peak of 13.7 percent in 2001 at the end of the 1990s boom, before falling back to 11.3 percent in 2003. Collections in 2006 totaled $269 billion, or 12.3 percent of general revenue....Most state income taxes are fairly flat, even in those states that apply graduated tax rates. In several states the top tax bracket begins at a very low level of taxable income; Alabama, for example, starts its top rate at $3,000. In other states the difference between the lowest and the highest tax rates is small: just 2 percentage points in Connecticut and Mississippi, for example."
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http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/state-local/specific/income.cfm
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in other words, state and local income taxes are, in the aggregate, only slightly progressive, and comprise only 12.3% of general revenue, with the remainder of state and local income coming from "non-progressive" sources.
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One other point that should be mentioned is "what do taxes pay for"? Most of the industrialized world has "single payer" health care...if we take this "european" perspective of seeing healthcare as something you pay "federal taxes" for (i.e. add health care costs to individual tax burdens), I doubt that the federal tax system would be progressive at all. In other words, the "progressivity" of the federal tax structure is dependent upon the US government not providing services that are considered federal responsibilities in the rest of the "civilized" world.
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BTW, do you have a link to the CBO study you mention?

where did you get this data " The state and local tax burden is about half the federal tax burden,
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according to the Tax Center, the federal government's share of total tax receipts is about 51%, with state governments collecting 29% and local government collecting 20%.
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nor does the CBO study show much in the way of "progressivity" of the tax system. In 2005, the top quintile had 55.1% of pretax income, and 51.6% of after tax income. The other four quintiles saw varying improvement in their after tax income percentages that show no significant sign of "progressivity" -- Its hard to argue that a tax system is "progressive" when the top 20% still make well over 50% of all income -- and only pay a 3.5% "premium" for the privilege of a grossly unjust income distribution system.
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The CBO study also skews the data somewhat by including "negative income tax" as part of the tax burden for the lowest quintiles. The fact that there is a direct cash transfer to those in the lowest 40% based on tax returns doesn't mean that the federal tax burden for those quintiles isn't 10.7% for the lowest quintile -- they are paying those taxes, and the fact that they are getting money back from the government does not mean that those taxes were not paid.