Re:Against a Tax Increase on Berkeley Students
by camiller on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @02:22PM
(#15655964)
They are not well defined terms and are meant more to evoke an emotional response. Progressive does mean that you pay at an increasing rate the higher your income is. A flat percentage tax (example everyone pays 18% no loopholes) should be neither progressive or regressive but most US liberals would still call it regressive because it would be if you consider the current rates as a baseline. A truly regressive plan would actually decrease rates as you went higher in income. Neither Federal or any state that has income taxes has a truly regressive tax schedule.
Edit: I suppose if you figure in sales taxes into overall tax burden you could call some states regressive. But that is not a feature of their income tax rates.
Re:Against a Tax Increase on Berkeley Students
by ameister14 on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @02:46PM
(#15656222)
Yes, and the top earners pay 396% more of their income than the bottom as far as federal income tax is concerned - this is traditionally understood to mean it's highly progressive as a system.
Even with a moderately regressive income tax the rich will be paying more total tax even though they are paying a smaller percentage of their income as tax. Therefore you can not make any conclusions about the fairness of a tax by saying that the top 20% of earners pay 80% of the total amount of income tax (it would have been absolutely crazy if this was not the case, unless everybody had the same income).
As such, I do not see how this article can be used to say anything about whether the tax is progressive or regressive (and as you mentioned, whether it is fair altogether).