I've been looking at the IRS's statistical tables. The most recent is for 2007: http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/07in01ar.xls. A few interesting statistics:
Of 142M total returns, only 90 million of them are taxable. I'm not sure all the reasons why a return might be "non taxable" but of the just under 48M nonpaying filers, $615 Billion of reported income are not taxed. Most of this seems to be coming from the 36M people who had less than $20K of income. In 2007, a family of 4 got a total $13,600 in exemptions, after the standard deduction of $10,700.
9 million people had $382B of long term net capital gains. 23 million people had $150B of dividends. This $532B is taxed at 15% after the Bush tax cuts of 2003 and all but about $50B is to people with incomes over $100K. Just taxing this as ordinary income would net the government about $100B.
1 million people had AGI of over $500K, a total of $1.842 trillion dollars. Nearly all of them had dividends, and $105B of the $150B went to people in this class. About half of them had long term capital gains, and $260B of the $382B went to these people. So if we were to raise the tax bracket for people making $500K or more by 4%, including dividends and long term gains, the government would net from this $67B.
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