The article Millionaires ask Congress to raise their taxes starts off with the following:

A group of two dozen millionaires stormed Capitol Hill on Wednesday, demanding lawmakers raise their taxes.

“We want to pay more taxes,” said California millionaire Doug Edwards, a former marketing director for Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). “If you’re fortunate, and you make more than a million dollars a year, you ought to pay more taxes.”

The millionaires want Congress to allow the tax cuts passed during the George W. Bush administration to expire. Some want higher taxes generally.

I don’t think that CNN quite understands that if you make over a million dollars a year in income, you are almost certainly far more than just a millionaire. I would judge being a millionaire as anybody with a net worth of over a million dollars. It does not take an income anywhere near a million dollars a year to be a millionaire under that definition. Anybody who has made $100,000 a year for a substantial number of years ought to be a millionaire, and then some.

So CNN is being disingenuous if not purposely deceptive to imply that people with only a net worth of $1 million are being considered for tax increases.

One person commented on the post:

daustin97222, 37 minutes ago
“”The tax burden must be shifted from the lower income earners to the rich right across the board!””

Somebody wrote that here. The bottom 50% of earners pay 2.25% of the federal income taxes paid, and the top 50% of earners pay 97.75% of the federal income taxes paid (source: IRS – document upon demand). So I’m not sure how you are going “shift” the load, at least for income taxes.

My response to this post was:

ssg13565, 2 minutes ago in reply to daustin97222
I don’t think you understand the use of statistics very well. The numbers you quote, if true, should not make you wonder how to shift the load.

As an extreme example, to make it easy to see my point, consider the following. Suppose there are only two tax payers. One earns $10,000 a year and pays no income taxes, but does pay Social Security and Medicare taxes. Suppose the other tax payer earns $1 billion a year and pays $5,000 in income taxes along with Social Security and Medicare.

Does it make sense to cut the Social Security and Medicare benefits of the poor person because the rich person pays 100% of the income taxes and you can’t figure out how to shift the burden of cuts for the poor into taxes for the rich?