Friday, April 29, 2011

Careful What You Wish For

This is brilliant.

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  1. EricApril 30, 2011 at 9:28 PM

    Great.

    This makes me think of something I have long thought: that those who support income redistribution through the tax structure view those with high income as having been 'lucky', 'born into it', etc. instead of working hard to develop skills and experience that the economy values more highly because there is a shortage of that skill. On the converse though, some on the flip side refuse to admit that there are class structures within our society which reward some who don't really deserve it, or who didn't really work as hard as the guy in the cube next to them to get there.

    To be fair though, I deplore statements about the tax structure which cherrypick the 'type' of tax they are talking about in order to make their statistics more shocking. That means I pretty much am sick of any statement on tax structure because few actually add up the total tax burden (Federal Income, social security / medicare, state income, sales, property, etc) and then use those numbers to investigate something. The fact is that we have some progressive taxes, some neutral taxes, and some regressive taxes (percentage of income wise). You have to add them all up to get the whole picture.

    I suspect states with no income tax are considerably less redistributive than those which have a state income tax, such that a skilled economist should be able to do comparisons and draw some conclusions on the societal behavioral changes that a greater redistribution of wealth through the tax structure cuases.

    But what do I know? I'm just a taxpayer.

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