I had my taxes done at H&R block, and they have a calculator for effective tax rate % they show you at the end. Mine was 19.6% which the analyst even joked was more than Mitt’s. I did mine on the Obama calculator and got 20.1% which isn’t that far off.
dont think any lying is going on, I just dont think any of us understand the damn complicated tax code.
I don’t know how you could judge a system to be regressive or progressive without considering marginal utility, which is a lot more of a precise measure than “discretionary dollars.” After all we heard the bankers crying that none of their money was discretionary since they had all those nanny expenses.
I’d say that the only fair tax system was a flat tax, but flat in terms of marginal utility, not by percent of income paid after the floor. If we use that as a measure, then the flat tax is indeed regressive, and the effectively flat tax at high income levels is regressive also. If I plotted your tax rate data as modified by some reasonable marginal utility figure, this would be clear.
Mathematically you can isolate portions of taxpayers and see if the system is progressive for that portion. I think the system is probably reasonably progressive up to the middle class under this analysis. However in terms of tax policy, you have to look at everyone. If it is regressive at the top, then either the bottom 90% is paying too much or the government is getting too little, and we have debt, loss of services, or both.
If you don’t think marginal utility should be used, what would you use? Lots of people seem to want to justify taxes based on the benefit society provides to each person, but I think this is impossible to calculate and is obviously not identical for all those at one level of taxable income.
Clearly any system could be tweaked to be somewhat more progressive, but our system is extremely regressive at high levels of income, so tweaking is not good enough.
You’re a bit late for that, but I dare say you’ll find many of their descendants here.