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Enlil said:
Far more than 11 million don't pay federal income tax.

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By Brad Plumer September 18, 2012

A leaked fundraising video caused a stir Monday when it showed Mitt Romney taking a rather caustic view of Obama supporters.

In particular, Romney bemoaned the fact that nearly half the country doesn't pay federal income taxes: "These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

So why don't many Americans pay income taxes? And what taxes do they pay? Let's try to do a comprehensive breakdown in — yes — charts:

1) About 46.4 percent of U.S. households didn't pay federal income taxes in 2011. Mitt Romney's right about that.
(Tax Policy Center)

2) That number is abnormally high right now in part due to the recession and slow recovery. When people lose their jobs or see their paychecks drop, they tend to pay fewer income taxes as well. (That's why the budget deficit tends to increase in a bad economy.) Additionally, Congress has passed a slew of tax cuts as part of its stimulus efforts. So that's skewed the number of nonpayers. When the economy's at full employment, as it was in 2007, it's usually only about 40 percent of U.S. households that aren't paying income taxes:
(Center on Budget and Policy Priorities)

3) The vast majority of households that don't pay federal income taxes are either elderly or paying payroll taxes. As you can see below, 60 percent of those who don't pay income tax are still working and paying taxes for Social Security and Medicare. Their tax liability is just too low to qualify for the income tax. Another 22 percent of non-payers are retirees.

Only about 7.9 percent of households are not paying any federal taxes at all. That's usually because they're either unemployed or on disability or students or are very poor.
(Tax Policy Center)

4) Many low-income workers don't pay federal income taxes thanks, in part, to a series of tax cuts endorsed by Republicans over the years. The graph below from the Tax Policy Center shows why so many workers who do earn income don't have to pay the income tax. They're exempt under various provisions of the tax code.

For instance, most (though not all) elderly households are excluded from paying taxes on their Social Security benefits. And low-income workers with children can qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Child Tax Credit. As Keith Hennessey explains, the latter was a major GOP initiative during the 1990s and 2000s, and conservatives used to tout them as vital poverty-reduction measures:

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