Friday, March 26, 2010

Are taxes progressive?


Or flat?


The chart was abstracted from a paper by Piketty and Saez.
The Y axis is tax rate, the X is percentile income. I added the 20th percintile, fake point, to represent income from the Dead Zone below positive tax. This tax chart includes all federal taxes and no state taxes. The 40th percentile is an income of 15k and represents the Dead Zone jump when an individual escapes serfdom. The 80th percentile is 52k in salary, they pay the average cost of the federal government. This chart does not include negative taxes (subsidies) except for the fake point I inserted.

If ObamaCare is inefficient, then the DeadZone increase to something like the 50th percentile, so if we keep the 80th percentile as the mean taxpayer, we only have a 30% middle class. That won't work and a government Recalculation results. Local governments need a broad middle class to exist.

Changes to taxes as a result of Obamacare found here. $210 billion increase in rates for those above the 90th percentile, and $400 billion in cuts to Medicare.

Notice that the mean taxpayer pays 20% of the $52,000 in income at the 80th percenttile. Bruce Barlett is wrong, the Tea Partyers are right.

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