Paul Caron reports that the United States tax system is more progressive than France, Germany, Belgium and the UK.
No doubt my friends on the left, tax bloggers Linda Beale and James Maule, and those of their ilk, will find a way to recast the study and the charts below as evidence of a right wing conspiracy to lie to the American public about taxes. Of course, they are the ones who must lie about studies like these because if the US tax system is already highly progressive, and if wealthy people are already paying the bulk of federal income taxes, their contention that the rich are gaming the system is emasculated.
Here’s Paul’s post:
The Facts About Tax Progressivity
Lucy Barnes (Nuffield College, Oxford), The Facts About Tax Progressivity:
[T]he question of how progressive the system is an empirical question. In fact, the system of taxation in the United States is relatively progressive. What makes this fact surprising is that tax progressivity and fiscal redistribution (the reduction of inequality by government action) are often conflated, and it remains true that redistribution in the US is low, due mainly to the relatively small size of the US government.
