The numbers are in, and they’re eye-catching: Gov. Jerry Brown‘s “soak the rich” tax increase really did drench them.

And it made California’s harmful tax volatility that the governor regularly rails about even worse.

Tax volatility — the extreme surging and plummeting of income tax revenue — is the scourge that inflicted horrendous budget deficits on the state during the recession.

New figures from the Franchise Tax Board show that the wealthiest 1% of Californians paid 50.6% of the state income tax in 2012 — up from 41.1% in 2011. It means that of nearly 15 million tax returns, about 150,000 generated more than half the revenue.

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