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.

The DeadZone marginal Tax will rise

The great bulk of entitlement costs are born in the passage into positive income tax rates. The DeadZone rears its ugly head. The sudden expansion of centrally planned, defined benefit program raises the arbitration cost in wage settings. Each adjustment to a wage setting is made complex by its variable effects with the government benefit payment.

So, the economy set fewer wage slots, for a while, to reduce transaction costs. This doesn't last, as technology pushes for more wage setting that arbitrate the entropy frontier. The puzzle is the process of minimalizing entitlements effects. One possibility is to bring employee health services inside the firm, the clinic approach. Then the firm has a strong case for exemptions, but the result is self selection. Then the mandate creates a buyers pool for the retail clinic which have economies of scale. A puzzle for me.