The reason people tend to respond favorably to proportionality as a standard for tax fairness is that it comports with their intuitions and experience.
When you include all taxes together, the wealthiest 20 percent have tax burdens more than twice as large as a share of income than those of the poorest 20 percent.
Our challenge is not simply to inform policymakers and the public. First we have to convince them to discard the faulty information they already "know."
The poorest 20 percent receive $8 in government services for every $1 they pay in taxes. The wealthiest 20 percent receive 41 cents in services for every $1 in taxes.
North Carolina’s state and local tax burden is roughly proportional, not steeply regressive as some liberals claim.
Quick: tell me how much you paid in federal, state, and local taxes last year. And wht percentage of your income went to taxes?
When it comes to stealing – excuse me, taxing – the earnings of the wealthy, America is no slouch by international standards.
If your goal is social – to redistribute income or punish productive people you don’t like, for example – then the empirical details of fiscal policy don’t matter to you.
The reason everyone feels comfortable with fairness claims is that they define fairness differently. What is fair to one is unfair to the other.
When households pay premiums for life insurance, they pay out of taxable dollars. Thus their death benefits shouldn’t be taxed.
The current discussion of a possible summer holiday on federal gasoline taxes is one that is has become extremely muddled.The reason is that advocates and opponents of a holiday tax break are each arguing their case from a different perspective. The range of arguments over a federal gasoline tax holiday is broad: costs vs. benefits, long run vs. short run, overall macroeconomic growth vs. family welfare. The result is a confusing jumble of analysis and policy prescrptions, with nary a market option among the suggestions.
