Perhaps even more outrageous, more than 10,000 wealthy households paid no federal income taxes at all, according to a recent IRS study.

But it’s not just those wealthy households that got a lucky break. Tax rates have fallen the most for the richest Americans since the mid-1990s. Tax rates for the top 0.01 percent plunged 9.4 percent between 1995 and 2007, while tax rates for the 20th to 99th percentiles fell just 2.9 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.